www.mattkprovideo.com/2025/08/21/ep-21-marina-oswald-tapes-rough-cut/

This is a preliminary, rough cut of episode 21, dealing with the FBI surveillance tapes of Marina Oswald.

www.mattkprovideo.com/2025/08/13/episode-19-dr-chad-zimmerman/

Episode 19, Dr. Chad Zimmerman

In this episode of ON THE TRAIL OF DELUSION, Fred Litwin hears Dr. Chad Zimmerman discuss what he learned visiting the National Archives to view the original John F. Kennedy autopsy photographs and X Rays.

Doctor Chad Zimmerman explains what the original JFK autopsy photographs and X- Rays tell us about the origin of the bullet wounds.

Dr. Zimmerman is one of the few people allowed into the National Archives in College Park, Maryland to see the original, unaltered materials. His background in Chiropractic medicine gave him unique insights into what these materials really tell us.

His scientific approach to research led him away from conspiracy theories and towards accepting the Lone Gunman narrative. He has been a consultant on several research projects and the Discovery Channel documentary: “Discovery Channel – Unsolved History, JFK Beyond The Magic Bullet.”

In addition to being a professional chiropractor, Dr. Zimmerman is also the producer of the acclaimed true crime pod-cast, Footsteps in the Dark.
www.footstepsinthedarkpodcast.com/

Transcription of this episode:

I want to thank everybody for coming this afternoon. My name is Fred Litwin.
Noted author Fred Litwin. And of course, Fred is also the author of I Was a Teenage JFK Conspiracy Freak, On the Trail of Delusion,
and Oliver Stone’s Film Flam. The Demagogue of Dealey Plaza.
Fred Litwin is here. He’s a longtime author and certainly watcher of politics.

Joining us, Fred Litwin, great to have you here.
Thank you very much.

So, welcome to another edition of On the Trail of Delusion,
where I try to separate fact from fiction in the JFK assassination
and try to give you something of substance rather than the usual idiocy you find on YouTube
or on the internet um from the conspiracy idiots.

So today my special guest is Dr. Chad Zimmerman. 
Dr. Zimmerman was born and raised in Sioux City. Iowa

He graduated from Northwestern College of 
Chiropractic in 1999 and he practiced in Sioux City,
Colorado and now in Fargo, North Dakota.
He also now has a true crime podcast called
Footsteps in the Dark.
Now what makes Dr. Zimmerman so 
interesting is he is one of the few doctors to have actually examined
JFK’s autopsy X-rays and photographs
and I thought that he could basically come on here and really tell us exactly what 
those autopsy materials tell us.
So welcome Dr. Zimmerman.
Well thanks thanks for having me.
Okay so how did you get into the JFK assassination?

I think I read this might have been in your bio 
or there was somebody else that you talked to very similar.
I got into it when I was in high school. My father took me to the movie JFK by Oliver Stone. I was transfixed by what I had just seen.
2:07
And then my father started to kind of feed it and he bought me
On the Trail of the Assassins by Jim Garrison.
2:13
I started reading it. I happened to be on a trip to New Orleans at the time.
I begged my mother to to let me go walk or take me around the French Quarter
2:19
so I could go see 54 544 Camp Street
2:25
and, you know, all the sites. And so, uh, I think the movie was The Seed, the books were the fertilizer.
2:32
And by 96, I think it it was, I taught my, uh, former high school history class on the top 20 reasons I was convinced that, JFK was killed as a result of a conspiracy, right?
2:44
and then I went to school and I got smarter. And after having physics education and medical education and different things like that,
I happened to stumble across a book called Case Closed by Gerald Posner.
2:58
And then I became very confused. And when I’m confused, I start tearing things apart. And that’s kind of what happened.
When I graduated chiropractic school, I got a job. I started developing an income.
And I started purchasing resources.
And one of those would have been the 26 volumes of the Warren Commission report. I went through every single page of that.
I bought a Carcano like Oswalds. I have ammunition just like it.
And I got on the forums. I got on the old, you know, alt assassination.jfk stuff. I started interacting with people. eventually I became a moderator in that group and spent a few years doing that.
Got to have some really interesting conversations with
3:41
a lot of very interesting people and I just started working through it.
I had my top 20 reasons why I was convinced it was a conspiracy and I went through one of them each one of them line by line
3:49
and I kept crossing them off and by the time I got done there was really nothing left, right?
3:55
And my intent on it I think was probably a little ego gratification at that time in my
4:01
life and wanted to potentially write write the next great bestseller book or or something.
4:08
But, you know, I think the draw to true crime for most of us is that we know it happened. We know there’s a truth that exists and that we want to find it.
And that that’s where my where the JFK journey took me.
I had some, you know, very neat opportunities there. I was able to go to the archives, see the original autopsy photographs and X-rays,
and spent three and a half hours with Larry Sturdivan there doing that.
but then by the time I got By the time I got done,
4:37
I had a US public that was 80% convinced of a conspiracy and I was now 20% that didn’t believe in that anymore.
4:42
So, I kind of moved on from it, honestly. Right. Okay. So,
4:50
very much one question about New Orleans. When you went to uh was was the Newman building still there
4:55
when you went to 544 Camp Street? Yeah, it was. Oh, you didn’t did you go inside at all or No,
5:01
I didn’t go inside. We just kind of we walked around. Um I’m trying to we’re going back you
5:07
know 30 year 29 years here. Um no we didn’t do much. We walked around. I remember if it was that
5:14
it was probably around that year we took a trip my mother and I to Dallas and that’s when I visited
5:20
the book depository for the first time. Right. And you know I think at that time I was still
5:26
pretty convinced of a of a conspiracy. Um, I had a roommate or a a gentleman that lived across the
5:32
hall from me and, you know, he had a a big giant stack of VHS tapes full of of conspiracy theory
5:41
um, shows on JFK. And so I would borrow those and and watch those. And and so I had, you know,
5:47
a thousand times more information telling me it was a conspiracy than I had otherwise, which, you know, generally means you got to find 5,000 times more things to to change your mind. But uh I
5:57
I think I did that in the course of you know four or five years. So okay. So look um obviously your
6:06
expertise is really on the medical and ballistic evidence. So um perhaps you can tell us a bit
6:11
about um how it how it happened that you went to the archives to see the autopsy materials. Well,
6:17
okay. So that was about 2004. I got into this about 2000. started on the the old, you know,
6:24
forum page and I just started asking questions and at some point I would I would naturally gravitate
6:32
towards the things I had some background in which was medical and ballistic and I started looking at things. One of the things that stands out that I remember was there being confusion about where
6:43
uh Kennedy was hit with the first shot. You know, was it at the base of the neck? Was it T2? Was it T3? Where was it? And I had a lot of resources available to me at the time. We had an
6:53
autopsy report. Nobody really questioned the 14 cm um uh dimension that was written, you know,
7:01
right below the mastoid. And we thought, okay, well, there’s a starting point here. I had a
7:06
I had an X-ray bank with hundreds of of full spine X-rays that my my employers had. And so
7:15
I started making measurements. You could see the mastoid. You could draw it down. I used myself as a model. I took X-rays and I so I started just investigating what’s the truth here.
7:24
And you know pretty soon I realized that you know 14 cm below the mastoid in the neutral position
7:32
like Kennedy pretty much was at autopsy um would land right near the base of the neck in a six foot
7:39
tall individual. And and so I went through the steps of showing that and proving it to myself first and then then I would have discussions about it. Eventually, it led to a web page. I
7:48
got I kind of got tired of explaining a whole bunch of things over and over again. And so, I created a a website where I would post articles on these various aspects that I was looking at.
8:00
And it just, you know, kind of evolved over time. Um, I got into the ballistics aspect. I bought it.
8:06
I bought the rifle. I had to make my own rounds because it was $200 to $300 a box for the western
8:12
cartridge rounds. And so I was collecting those on the side. That was a lot of money to me back
8:17
then. So I didn’t want to shoot them. So I bought a thousand rounds of old World War II ammunition. Started pulling the bullets because they were all corrosive. Uh repackaging them into into
8:26
new brass and and powder. And then I would go out and I would conduct ballistics experiments. And
8:32
sometimes people would they’d say, “I think the first shot hit a tree branch. Could you go shoot it and show me what a bullet would look like if it does that?” And so I would I would go out on the
8:40
lunch. I had long lunch breaks about an hour and a half and I could drive about 15 miles, you know, shoot some things, videotape it, come back, pull off the data, you know, and move on to the next
8:50
thing. So, I did a lot of X-ray, I did a lot of ballistic stuff. Um, and eventually over time,
8:56
developed a pretty good understanding of things, or at least I thought I did. And I wanted to see
9:03
I I couldn’t test my hypothesis any further unless I had the actual autopsy photographs.
9:09
We were extremely transfixed on on the fox number eight photograph, the very closeup one. Um,
9:16
that was, you know, the Groden books and the different books always published that thing to make it look like it’s the back of the head. And you have the exit beveling and so it had to
9:24
be a shot from the front. And I had gotten a high quality scan um from a disc I think I bought off a
9:31
JFK Lancer or something. and and I was convinced that it was oriented incorrectly that and that
9:37
I could see a jar right kind of in that in that bottom right corner. And so I wanted to see it.
9:44
So my whole trip to the archive started with this burning desire that I I had to test, you know,
9:50
a hypothesis. And so I had found out that Larry Cerivan had gotten um permission to go. And so
9:58
I I reached out to Larry and uh he forwarded his the letter he’d sent to me. I I read through his
10:05
letter. I put my own letter together, sent it off to attorney uh Paul G. Kirk and then sure as heck
10:12
I got I got approved to do it. And so Larry and I scheduled the time to meet and flew out there and it was a really wonderful experience. It’s a tremendous facility they have there and obviously
10:22
tremendous care that they they provide for these irreplaceable one-of-a-kind um American artifacts,
10:29
which is kind of what they are now. But um Larry and I spent three and a half hours in a room. We,
10:34
you know, looking at them. We couldn’t touch anything. Um if you wanted something moved, they had to move it. But uh we were able to to make some drawings of of some things. We wanted
10:44
to to see if we could figure out answer some of the questions. you know, where where was the head
10:49
where was the head wound at? Um, you know, what was the orientation on the F8 photograph? Uh, what
10:55
could we see in the X-rays? That was a really big one and a really interesting experience because
11:00
the the quality of the X-rays is, you mean, it’s infinitely better than the stuff that anyone else
11:06
is looking at. Those are poor Xerox copies that are kind of black and white, whereas we’re looking
11:11
at an actual X-ray film that’s it’s actually light blue. It’s dark with shades of blue in it and and
11:18
there’s so much detail um in those X-rays and you could you could obviously see what were bullet
11:25
fragments um you know they were as white as or as you know as light as could possibly be and so as
11:32
we looked uh through those things you know I would say there was three four five really interesting
11:37
takeaways that we got from that experience and then I came back I thought we had made some great
11:42
discoveries and and uh I started digging through uh Humes and Boswell’s prior testimonies and I
11:49
think it was probably the HSCA stuff and I was going through their testimonies as as they’re looking at the autopsy photographs and the X-rays and sure enough, you know, here they’re describing
12:00
what I saw and here they they’re describing what I saw, but they didn’t know what they were seeing in
12:05
in many cases. You know, the one of the neat one of the most eyepopping discoveries was looking
12:12
at the the lateral X-ray of President Kennedy’s shattered skull. And in the in the rear kind of
12:20
lower posterior portion back here, you could see little bone shards. Okay? They were the same exact
12:26
density as as the bone pieces you were seeing everywhere else, but here they were inside of the
12:32
skull. And the only way those could have gotten there is by being blown into it from an entrance
12:38
wound in the back of the head. So we went looking for the, you know, where’s this entrance wound
12:43
at? And on the the actual um lateral view, you really can’t see. And so they they enhanced it,
12:51
right? There’s the enhanced lateral X-ray. And when you look is that look at that sure as heck you can you can see a a spot right in the center of the back of the head in the
13:01
most rearmost portion of the head. Um there’s a defect right there and it looks like there might
13:07
it might have been a little bit of bevel beveling there. Um and it certainly correlates with what we found in the F8 photograph because the F8 photograph shows the entrance wound. That was
13:17
interesting because here we’re looking at multiple color photographs of that image. that image,
13:25
right? And and what you find out is that is that the camera angles from is kind of like from this
13:30
angle down and in and the ruler is where it’s at because they’re trying to point out where the where the entrance wound is. And so you could when you were looking at the at the pictures,
13:40
you could kind of you could look at them and kind of tell what order they were even taken in. Um,
13:46
in one of the pictures, so imagine you have a a child’s bottle of bubbles, right? And you shake it
13:53
up a little bit. You take the lid off and you have that film across the top of it. Yeah. Okay. There
13:58
there was film across the hole in the scalp, but the film was was blood. Okay. And it was covering
14:05
the entire hole. And then you look at the the next picture and that little film had broken and there
14:10
was this kind of violet purplish light that was coming through there and you’re looking at that and you’re like, “Oh my gosh, that’s the entrance moon right there.” Right? And so if you could take
14:19
these pictures and triangulate them a little bit, make sense of them, you could exactly pinpoint where that entrance wound was. And we took we had a an old 1960s military stereoscope I bought off
14:30
of eBay and we brought it there and we had them put them side by side and look so we could develop a three-dimensional image and things like that. Anyway, what I what I ended up concluding was that
14:40
um the Warren or the the pathologists, you know, two and a half centimeters right slightly above
14:47
the EOP, they were wrong and it was about an inch or so above that and it wasn’t where the Cowic
14:55
entrance was. There there’s nothing at the Cowic entrance. Um and there’s no such there’s no such trail of fragments, right? Trails of fragments exist in closed systems. Um, a blown aart skull
15:06
is no longer closed system. And you can’t rely on place, you know, the placement of things very well. And so we’re looking at this, we’re seeing this spot on the rear of most posterior part of
15:18
this lateral X-ray. Uh, oh, and that’s where those pencil lines, right? Remember the whole thing about the pencil lines? Well, the pencil lines were on it. And the there’s a horizontal
15:28
one that matches the bottom of the film. So, it’s the kind of we called it the horizontal film plane line there. And then the other one goes right up through the the middle of the the missing
15:38
area of the skull, but they converge right back at that exact point. And it’s it’s that part of
15:44
the film that’s cut off in the reproduction on the HSCA stuff. Um, that’s where the that’s where it
15:50
looked like the entrance was. Okay. And so the question became, okay, how did the pathologists get it wrong? Um, and I’m always going to rely on pathologists because they’re looking at they’re
16:00
looking at it, right? It’s hard to say they’re wrong, but they were wrong. And so why were they
16:06
wrong? And so I started looking at the premortem X-ray of of Kennedy and okay, they measured from
16:16
the EOP. Where’s the EOP? And I’m looking at this thing. Where’s the EOP? You can’t see a
16:22
very distinct EOP on an X-ray. um it’s got to be probably even harder um when it’s the actual skull
16:29
bone and there’s blood and all that kind of stuff. And so I I I had sent I’d read a book written
16:35
by a forensic anthropologist. And so I thought, well, what the heck? Early days in the internet,
16:42
everybody had a website and a contact email. I thought, well, send her send her an email. And so I sent her an email. I said, I’m looking at an X-ray. I’ve attached it. I’m just trying
16:50
to find the EOP on this. it’s part of a class project maybe or something like that. Uh would
16:56
could you help me out? And and she she emailed back. She goes, “Oh, it’s it’s called a bun EOP.
17:01
That means they hardly have one. Very hard to, you know, to find.” And I thought, “Okay, well, maybe that’s the reason, right? You could when you’re looking at the back of someone’s skull, you
17:09
can figure out the center of it, but if you can’t figure out where the landmark is, it’s really hard to to say slightly above or really far above or give an exact measurement.” And so I thought,
17:19
well, maybe the answer to this is really simple. um they couldn’t see the EOP. So maybe that’s why
17:25
they got it wrong. And I think that’s so much of this confusion over the decades um has come from
17:30
such a simple little mistake like that. So how far So in their estimate how far away how far was the
17:36
entrance when from what they were saying like was it they said slightly above they’re saying it was
17:43
slightly I don’t I don’t know what slightly above means 38 of an inch. It’s I would I would put the
17:49
entrance at somewhere in the neighborhood of an inch to an inch and a half above the EOP. Right.
17:54
Okay. I would put So why why do you think that the uh the HSSE got the caught it all wrong and saying
18:00
the the entrance wound was in the cow area? Well, if now I’m going on old memories here, but you
18:07
know, if you if you go back and you read through the the interviews of the pathologists, um they
18:13
couldn’t figure out where it was, right? They’re looking at the picture, the back of the head photo photograph, and what and there’s a ruler here and there’s a hole here and they’re saying that’s not
18:21
a bolt hole, right? I mean, that’s happened and they’re going, “Well, what’s that little white
18:28
thing down there?” Maybe I think it maybe it was down there. Like they didn’t know. They had it in their heads that it was lower than it was and then they went looking for it and couldn’t find it and
18:36
it resulted in all this confusion, you know. And then you have this this panel put together of,
18:43
you know, experts looking at stuff. I don’t know how long they’ve looked at stuff, but um they looked at it long enough to somehow conclude that a a frail of or a trail of fragments that that
18:54
leads nowhere. Like if you follow that trail, it hits bone and then the break in the bone’s
18:59
way down here, right? So, uh what kind of trail is that where you got to make a left turn in order to
19:05
find the fracture in the bone? So, I don’t I mean I don’t know like I remember years ago Bouiosi I
19:11
was uh corresponding with him on some things. I just gotten back from the archives and, you know,
19:16
he was putting the finishing touches on his book and I thought, well, I’m going to reach out to him and see if I strike Peter with anything and and just thought I had some interesting observations
19:25
um for him. And I would bring up things about the X-rays or the photographs, anatomical placements,
19:31
whatever. And they didn’t, you know, they didn’t agree with one of the previous uh esteemed uh
19:38
bodies. But, you know, he asked me the same thing. He’s like, “Well, why, you know, why are you saying this when these people with these degrees say this?” And I don’t know, you know, all I can
19:47
tell you is that, you know, I went to college from 1996 to 1999. X-rays were not well in use,
19:54
um, you know, probably until what, the 40s or 50s or something like that. Um, the quality and so you
20:01
look at these doctors that are pathologists in the 60s. um you know what’s the quality of the
20:07
textbooks that they’re working with when they when they went to school? I don’t know. Probably not very good. Um the things that I saw on the X-rays, I think a any firstear chiropractic student
20:19
um will see the same things on an X-ray, right? There’s a difference between what a bone shard the
20:24
the density of a bone shard versus the density of a metallic fragment on an X-ray. It’s night
20:30
and day. But I’m reading the pathology reports and they’re getting confused and they don’t know what it is. Um, so it tells me that I think um in terms of our western medicine and our science and
20:42
our education, we’ve just we’ve come a really long ways from the time that they went to school to the time I did. That’s the only way I can explain it. And so were the were there fracture lines coming
20:51
out of the the entrance wound in the in the back of the head? But you couldn’t see that. I mean, you can’t see the entrance. The only way let me when you you you know you’re taking
21:03
something that’s threedimensional and squishing it into two dimensions. So it makes the whole three-dimensionality of it very difficult. Um and so when you’re looking like an like an A to P,
21:13
you’re losing that depth perspective, right? Everything’s smooshed like this. Now you couldn’t
21:19
see you couldn’t really see the entrance wound clearly in in the AP. You understand the whole the whole skull is a fractured mess at this point. It’s it would take a long time to sketch out the
21:30
fracture pattern on it. Let me put it that way. Okay. And try to figure out what’s left side versus right side on like a lateral view. Um now could there were there some could there
21:40
have been some fractures there? There probably were. I just man it’s been so many years that
21:46
it’s been a while since I’ve thought about that. I think there was. Um, but you’re going to lose
21:51
a lot of that that depth being smooshed into the posterior fossa on a lateral view. And so
21:57
you it’s going to be hard seeing anything coming from it. But then when you get up into, you know, into other areas of the skull, you’re going to see some of those those fracture lines. But it’s like
22:08
I said, it’s very difficult um with a skull that that’s damaged to try to make sense of it all,
22:15
you know. But as I recall, I think there was a fracture line there. Otherwise, we wouldn’t have been terribly interested in that location anyway. Yeah, you lose a lot of that perspective,
22:27
right? So, um, what there’s so many questions here. So, well, first off, I I really wish they’d
22:34
actually make the autopsy, X-rays, and photographs public because, uh, but, you know, there’s the bootlegs out there, and it’s I think they should should actually make them public so people can do
22:44
their own analysis. Yeah. you know, I go back and I’ve always gone back and forth on that. You know,
22:49
I think of like if I had a child and the child was murdered um in some way, would I want, you know,
22:54
the images of that all over the place just because people have some sort of a, you know, stuck interest in it. So, as a family member, I can understand why they might not want something
23:04
like that. Um, and now in terms of of something that we’ve turned into a a political explanation
23:12
for everything under the sun, um, you know, maybe it’s not a bad idea to put that stuff out there to
23:22
answer some questions for people or something, but, you know, is there is there a long-term effect in doing that? I don’t know. like, well, yeah, I agree with you, but I would not want these
23:31
out if it was uh uh the only reason I want it out is the fact that we already have so many photos in
23:38
the public domain right now. So, yeah, I I mean, I agree. I rather have the real thing out there. So,
23:43
and particularly the X-rays. I don’t think there’s much harm in releasing the X-rays. No, I I the X-rays are very interesting to look at. And I think, you know, putting, you know,
23:52
the the color version F8 out there would end all of this so much of this nonsense that it shows
23:59
a an exit crater from a frontal shot. It clearly does not show that. It shows exactly the opposite.
24:04
Deep deep down inside, if you’re a Kennedy family member, like what does it matter? You you know, we
24:10
there’s people that are flat-earthers out there. Like you could give them everything. you know,
24:15
there could have been a, you know, high quality videotape of the actual assassination and you give
24:20
it to people and it’s just fake. Yeah. So, let me ask you a bit about the the entrance wound in the head. So, Dr. Boden said that um if if there was a lower lower than the collic entrance wound,
24:32
then the the cerebellum would have been damaged, but the cerebellum was not damaged. So, do you
24:37
do you see any problem? I don’t think that’s No, I don’t think that’s true. Um you saw the photographs of the brain. Yeah. Um the cerebell we looked at those if I remember I think we looked
24:47
at those in 3D too. So you had you have the the left hemisphere the right hemisphere the right
24:53
hemisphere looked like a plate of spaghetti. Okay. Left hemisphere was completely intact. Um, we
24:59
looked there was a a view of it from the inferior angle and we could I could see um some very small
25:09
uh linear little tears almost like I don’t know if it was like in the meningis or something you
25:17
know but um it looked like something that would have happened when you put your hands down and tried to lift the brain out. It it looked very explainable but no there was no bullet damage
25:28
to it but you know your cerebellum’s back in you know back there right right and you understand
25:37
that so calick and then you know roughly the the autopsy entrance point so this is the two things
25:44
they’re talking about it’s got to be this or it’s got to be this right nobody talked about this and
25:50
that’s going to be that’s going to be above the cerebellion right Right. And I think supports
25:56
that, you know. Right. So what I find interesting is is is the we actually there are no photographs
26:04
of the brain out there. There’s some drawings. Correct. But the the fact that the left hemisphere
26:09
of the brain is intact is proof that there’s no shot from the grassy null or the side. Well,
26:15
absolutely. That’s that’s a near perpendicular shot, right? Yeah. There’s no way. And so that
26:20
forces conspiracy people to say that that that the stringer those are those are not JFK’s brain,
26:27
right? That there’s somebody else’s brain. Yeah. I mean it’s it’s fake. It’s tampered with somebody
26:32
you know everything’s fake and tampered with when it doesn’t agree. So or you know I don’t
26:39
I don’t know how how do you how do you counter the nonsense? Like I know. So was there any indication that any of those materials had been altered or or faked? Not that we could see. No, I mean,
26:50
I don’t know how you would have done it in 1963 or 65 or whenever they think these things happened.
26:55
Um, you know, I remember years ago, I remember reading that if you viewed the the photographs,
27:02
I think it I think this came from Groten because I think Groden, which I don’t know how he got to
27:08
be part of the HSCA, but he was, um, you know, I think he even admitted that the pictures were
27:14
authentic. Yeah. Okay. And he he made the comment that if you looked at a stereop pair of of these
27:21
pictures under under a stereoscope that had they been tampered with it it would be you know as
27:27
obvious as could be and you know we didn’t look at every single one of them in stereop pairs. We
27:33
looked at F8. We looked at the brain. Um there was there was no evidence of that. But further,
27:39
one of the things that stood out to me was uh if you looked I sent you a link to to Lee Oswald’s
27:46
autopsy photographs, right? Yeah. Did you notice the double exposures and some of the terrible
27:52
photography, right? Kennedy, the best thing about him being, you know, hijacked from from Texas and
27:58
sent to Maryland is they had the guy that taught the course um there that night and the photographs
28:05
were fantastic. There might have been one or two out of four dozen or however many there were that
28:11
were a little out of focus or something, but you could count the hairs on the side of his head. That’s how clear a lot of those pictures were. So, I don’t know how they would have been faked.
28:20
Right. Right. No, I I I don’t know either. It’s it’s just it’s just I mean, the other argument
28:25
they say is that Stringer um didn’t take the bachelor bachelor view of the brain, but he
28:32
took the other one. But of course both both views of the brain must must have been consistent. How
28:38
could you know I mean I mean it just doesn’t make sense. You can you can slice and dice your way out
28:45
of facts a million different ways but what do you think of Dr. David Mantic’s view of uh his density
28:52
readings saying that the some of the X-rays were had been altered? Well I mean honestly so at the
28:58
point that I read that book I was still I was kind of on the fence about a lot of things. I was very excited to see that a book was coming out um that was done by you know intelligent people with
29:10
big degrees and and interesting ideas and people that were actually testing things. Uh that was my
29:16
feeling going into it until I read the book and then it kind of got destroyed. Um and but I was
29:23
really interested you know Mantic I thought had a really interesting idea. Um, and so he modified
29:30
an an optical densitometer and took it in there and supposedly it made measurements at, you know,
29:36
tenth of millimeter increments or some bizarrely small distance. Um, and so that was I read it. It
29:45
was interesting and I went and I looked, you know, he’s in that book they’ve got that pterodactyl
29:52
superimposed over a lateral skull and kind of kind of mockery mockery built into the book. And when I
30:00
went and looked at the X-rays, I’m like I looked at it and I’m like, you know, at this point in time, I’ve looked at hundreds of X-rays, something like that. Hundreds or thousands of them, I don’t
30:09
know. And I mean, it was it was a part of my daily practice. And I’m looking at this this lateral
30:14
X-ray. And I’m like, this is a lateral X-ray. Like it there was nothing crazy about it. You know,
30:20
they always taught you in school, you know, step away from it. Blur your vision a little bit. If
30:26
anything doesn’t look right, it probably isn’t right. You know, that was the radiologist teaching us this. And here I’m looking at this thing and I’m backing away. I’m squinting. I’m looking at
30:35
it. Nothing looked abnormal about that X-ray. And I don’t know how you’d fake that thing, you know,
30:41
with the f fracture patterns and all this kind of stuff. I would think anything faked in it would stand out like a sore thumb, but nothing did. It looked very very very genuine to me. Okay.
30:51
So then, and that brings me point because kind of where we’re leading into there. One of the things that we wanted to look at was that 6 and 12 millimeter fragment, right? That people think, oh,
31:02
they took, you know, a slice of the bullet and x-rayed it and stuck it on there. And that was
31:07
tada the case against Oswald. And the first thing that stood out to me looking at that actual X-ray
31:14
is that it’s not a nice neat semic-ircular slice. It it has some irregular margin to it that doesn’t
31:20
come through in the in the crappy reproduction that they that the HSCA put out there. And but
31:27
when as we got we looked in and started looking a little closer, I looked at Larry and I said, “Larry, there’s another fragment inside of that fragment.” And he looked and he’s like,
31:36
“Yep.” And and I said, “But look at the rest of the film.” I said, ‘You have these grid lines,
31:42
right? And for for the viewer, what grid lines are. So, normally you take a film cassette and you
31:50
put it in this tray, slide it into this big thing, and then you line your subject up and that’s
31:56
called a it’s called a film bucky. And inside of the cassette, there are what what are called these
32:01
rare earth screens. And when X-rays hit it, they glow. And so they can use these rare earth screens
32:08
to create um something that will help expose the X-ray utilizing less X-rays, right? And so it’s a
32:16
safety measure. We don’t have to use as much X-ray to create the image. And but if if you don’t have
32:22
a film bucky, because the purpose of the film bucky is that when you push the exposure button,
32:28
it’s supposed to vibrate really quick like this so you don’t create lines on the X-ray. Okay. Now, in
32:35
my practice at the time, we had a plain fil film X-ray machine and you could just turn the Bucky off. You could still put it put a picture in there because some things they don’t want you, you know,
32:44
X-raying extremities, for instance. Sometimes they didn’t want you to to have the film Bucky on and
32:50
create any subtle little change to the X-ray. So, sometimes we would turn it off. But anyway,
32:56
I was able to replicate, you know, a skull. I had a a plastic skull and um, you know, took an X-ray
33:03
of it with the film bucky off in order to create, you know, a baseline. Um, so anyway, we’re kind
33:09
of circling around in different directions here. Kennedy’s X-rays were not taken in a film bucky.
33:15
They they would lay the cassette right under his head or stick it right next to his head or whatever they wanted to look at and they would take the X-ray right there and always left these
33:25
grid lines. Okay. Well, I’m looking at this 6 and 12 millimeter fragment and inside of it there’s
33:30
another fragment in there. And so there’s there’s enough contrast between the two fragments that we
33:36
could still see the two fragments. And I thought, well, okay, if this was a fake, they’d have to put
33:43
the bigger fragment in there later and you would you would still see these grid lines, you know,
33:49
just shadows of these grid lines in there. And we didn’t see that. And I thought, okay, well,
33:55
this to me seems like this is a legit that’s it’s a legitimate fragment on a legitimate X-ray. And
34:00
so I remember coming back to my office and man, that that sat with me for a long time. And I I
34:07
sat and thought about it. And so I I decided to test it. And I I took a small metal fragment and
34:15
uh taped it onto this plastic uh skull that I had, took an X-ray with the grid lines. And
34:22
um the the fragment obscured the grid lines from showing up. So you had this white nice neat white
34:27
fragment with grid lines around it. So then I took um another fragment and I I’m I made just an X-ray
34:36
of the of of a of a frag larger fragment. So now I have a film that’s all black with just
34:42
this white round semic-ircular fragment. So then I I I had a piece of copy film. Now copy film
34:48
works differently. It’s it’s exposed by, you know, fluorescent lights or whatever. And so you would
34:54
take you go into the dark room and you would take you would put your copy film down and then you would um put your your skull film down with the grid lines on it and and you’d make a duplicate
35:08
um of or excuse me I think I did it the other way around. I think I put the the black film with the
35:13
big fragment in and I and I made an image of that or anyway however I did it. This was a
35:18
long time ago. I did one then the other um to do to to do what Mantic claimed was done. Okay. And
35:27
when I developed it, it was perfect. But you could see the grid lines. You couldn’t see it
35:33
around the small fragment, but you could see the grid lines within that larger fragment exactly like I predicted it would it would have to be. And that did not exist in that X-ray at the National
35:43
Archives. So I became absolutely convinced that that uh it was it was original that that 6 and
35:51
12 millimeter fragment uh existed and was real. And so so later down the road I ended up somehow
35:58
I ended up in in contact with Mantic. There was another researcher and because I can’t it was
36:03
John somebody and I can’t remember so I won’t name it but we were he was the intermediary going back
36:10
and forth and I brought this this fact up about these grid lines and how there weren’t any within
36:15
the boundaries of that larger fragment and he he came back Mantic came back and said oh I checked
36:22
my notes from the archives and it says that there were grid lines inside the fragment and I thought
36:28
okay now it’s now where he said, she said kind of a thing. Um, I have the chiropractic degree. He’s
36:35
got the fancy medical degree. I’m screwed, right? Cuz this is where I would love for them to release
36:41
those things because then I could show you what I was talking about with it. So, anyway, we dropped the argument at that point. It was kind of a no-win situation. But um I went back and I looked
36:51
at his OD measurements and you know he has this uh this line and it goes up like this and across
36:58
the 6 and 12 millimeter fragment like that and they’re taking it these at these extremely tiny
37:04
minute increments and and stuff. Well, if there were grid lines, his little graph would go like
37:10
this and these would be the grid lines. There’s no evidence of the grid lines in his own OD data,
37:17
right? So, so anyway, I’m pretty convinced that’s a that’s a legit X-ray. That’s a legit fragment,
37:23
you know. So, okay. And and so tell me what the the entrance to JFK’s neck, there’s some people
37:29
who would say it’s impossible for it to enter at the the base of the neck and exit the throat
37:34
without hitting the the vertebra. And and so it’s an impossible shot. Is that true? It’s not impos
37:42
it’s it’s not impossible. um you just don’t hit the vertebrae, you know, like ver here here’s
37:48
a these are lumbar spine vertebrae, you know, they’re only so big. They have spaces between and
37:53
the whole nine yards. I mean, they can be missed. People people get shot in that area um frequently
38:01
and and and the bone’s not hit, you know. So, I I most of the time that that argument gets made,
38:08
it’s because they’re thinking of the anatomy incorrectly. Okay? You know, we forget that when
38:14
you’re looking at the neck that the lower part of the neck is tilted like this, right? Well,
38:20
how can a bullet that hits at, you know, let’s say this is C7. How can a bullet at C7 drop 2 in
38:27
and still be at C7? Well, it’s because the plane is is on an angle like this, right? And so, when
38:36
you’re not think, you know, I I took eight months of of gross human anatomy. I dissected cadaavvers.
38:42
um all those kinds of things and and we just we tend to think of things in terms of plane angles
38:48
and things that the average person doesn’t but the statement is nonsense. Um you certainly can
38:55
there was no evidence that a bone was hit with him. I saw his his his lower cervical X-ray. So
39:01
if you go back to um to Dr. Latimer and you know he thought he saw little bone chips or something
39:09
like that in that X-ray there. There’s nothing there. Um I stared at that thing for like 10 minutes. I couldn’t find anything that looked like bone little bone chips or anything. I
39:20
think he saw just there might have been just some it’s very common. Most X-rays have some
39:25
kind of small little artifacts on it. Um just artifacts from film processing and stuff. There
39:31
might have been some little small little linear things like that, but there were you couldn’t
39:38
see any bone damage at all. Um, you go back to the pathology reports, you know, of course, you know,
39:45
if you’re if you’re a non-believer in those, then turn this off right now, I guess. But, um,
39:50
they couldn’t find any damage to bone, right? The the the lung apex was bruised, not penetrated. So,
39:59
a bullet had to traverse at a distance high enough to cause a bruise but not damage the
40:06
the the the lung apex. Um, if you look at the anatomy of the lung apex, it’s what is it? T1,
40:13
the lung apex is at the vertebral level of T1. So, the bullet had to come in above that because the
40:19
lung wasn’t hit. Right. Right. Pretty soon now you’re above the collar bone. Now you’re above the rib cage. You’re above everything. Now you just have to be far enough to the right not to
40:28
hit a transverse process or something. And that’s not that difficult. You know, honestly, you look
40:35
at the trajectories based on Dale Meyer stuff, it works out just fine, right? So, what do you think
40:40
of what and what do you make of the people who tell who tell us, well, look at what the Parkland doctor said and and and and they all we we have to take what they said seriously and and uh and
40:52
that’s proof of a shot from the front. Okay. Okay. Well, my thought my first thought on that is let’s scrap the FAA and anything they do on on invest on on plane crash investigations and just go with
41:04
what the people on the ground saw. Right. Right. We’d have more plane crashes. Yep. Yep. You know,
41:11
it’s people forget people that aren’t in health care, I don’t think, quite understand that
41:17
there’s an enormous difference between general practice doctor and an ER doctor and and a and
41:23
a cardiothoracic surgeon versus an orthopedist. Um, they don’t know all things, okay? And your
41:32
emergency per your emergency trauma people, they’re amazing people. um what they can process
41:38
in in minutely short periods of time to save lives is amazing, right? And they’re the firefighters.
41:46
You bring them in to put out the fire. Okay, great. But they don’t know how to put it back together again. That’s why they bring in the other surgeons, right? And so you’ve got a bunch
41:57
of firefighters in the medical field that are trying to put out a fire and what was it a minute
42:02
or two that went by before they noticed he was shot in the head? Um, and then he’s dead. Okay,
42:08
wrap it up. Get it out. Get to the next thing. And then let’s let the people that have hours and hours of time on their hands to uh methodically go through this and figure out what happened. And
42:18
so you you always have to lean towards your your your pathologists who are spending the hours with
42:23
the body trying to trying to figure things out, not the people that spent minutes trying to save a life that that was unfortunately extinguished. Um, they weren’t with the body very long. Yeah. I
42:34
know they’re 15 20 minutes and they were a very crowded room. Uh they were frantic trying to do
42:40
all sorts of stuff. They’re not they’re not, you know, they’re not probing the wounds and checking
42:45
angles and, you know, they had no idea what the extent of the damage to the skull was or where
42:50
bullets. That wasn’t their job. Um that’s somebody else’s job. So yeah. No, I’m I’m struck by there
42:57
was uh the ARB interviewed a forensic radiologist and Douglas Horn who was part of the the process
43:04
asked that radiologist what do you think of the Parkland doctors? He said I I couldn’t care less.
43:09
I have no you know throw it out. I I don’t don’t even bring it up you know and and and I thought
43:15
yeah you know it’s I just don’t get why people are so fixated on the Parkland doctors. Well,
43:20
I think you know the answer to be honest with you, the answer is that I I view the the followers of
43:28
the Kennedy assassination kind of like I I I view people with with political attitudes. Um,
43:34
you have 40% that always vote this way and 40% that always vote this way and you have 20% in the middle trying to figure things out. And that’s kind of the way it is in this in this group, too.
43:44
the vast majority of the people in the community already have their mind made up and so they they
43:49
naturally subconsciously seek out things that that support their opinion and then when they when
43:55
they’re countered with something that disputes their opinion um you know then they they’ll go to
44:01
extreme lengths to try to preserve their opinion by invoking you know Parkland ER doctors over the
44:08
the autopsy pathologists um and and they feel perfectly justified in doing it But logically,
44:14
it doesn’t make any sense. Yeah. And it’s the same reason why I don’t uh I don’t really spend that much time uh debating on Facebook or elsewhere with hardcore conspiracy believers because I’ll
44:25
never change their mind. But I want to post my articles so the people in the middle perhaps can
44:31
read what I’ve written and maybe, you know, maybe they’ll be influenced. Yeah. Well, that’s all
44:36
you can do. You can, you know, lead the horse to water and hope they take a drink, but that’s all you can do. Okay. Well, here’s a question for you from, you know, the the the hole in in Kennedy’s
44:45
jacket and and and uh shirt, isn’t that isn’t that evidence of a very low bullet wound to the back?
44:54
Oh god. Uh no, it’s it’s not because bodies and clothing move, right? Um and so unless you have
45:03
a clothing and a body in the same exact position, it’s it’s worthless uh information, you know. I I
45:09
can’t tell you the dozens and dozens and dozens and dozens of hours that I put in on that issue.
45:17
It was stupidly insane. But I was 20some and I had a lot of energy, I guess. But, you know,
45:23
I went through dozens and dozens and dozens of X-rays. We, you know, was Cliff Varnell was the
45:29
guy that that was proddding me in all this stuff. And you know, he was the he was the guy this guy
45:34
music buff in San Francisco who thought there’s no way uh a tailored outfit would ever bunch up,
45:40
you know, uh which I thought was a pretty poor argument, but you know, I put the work in. I went through dozens of X-rays and we looked at things like, you know, what level is the chin at relative
45:50
to the spine in a neutral in a relatively neutral position and um the 14 cm acchromian measurements
45:56
and mastoid measurements and reproduce it on X-rays and just over and over and over
46:01
again. The reality is is that the second you you take a a a thin folded shirt and you put it on,
46:09
the the linear relationships from this button to this button change, right? The dimensions change
46:16
and then so it changes just from putting it on. It changes from, you know, moving your arm up.
46:21
It changes if you lean back and the clothing gets pushed up a little bit. You know, you can watch on
46:27
almost any news show where they’re interviewing people, somebody’s sitting in a chair wearing a suit and it’s got a big bunched up spot in it, you know, and so what did I do? I I I got a shirt. I
46:38
measured the same distance. I, you know, glued on a piece of metal to it. Um, put it in front of an
46:43
X-ray. If my arms down, where’s it at? What if I do this? And, you know, we did all these different things. And sure enough, when it’s bun, it it had to be bunched up to be in that position, right?
46:58
Can a can a shirt and a jacket bunch up at the same time? Yeah, clearly it did. You know, um it
47:05
it can or it can’t. Those are the two options. But right, they do bunch, you know, it’s a 50% thing
47:11
and maybe it, you know, so I don’t know. It’s it’s again it’s gra kind of grasping at straws to try
47:17
to make a preconceived conclusion work I think but um you know the data was the data in terms of when
47:24
I went through the whole thing. So and and what what is your thoughts on the single bullet theory
47:33
you’re now I’m remember so in 2004 was right around the same time that I went to the archives
47:38
um earlier that year I came to work on a Saturday I checked my email I had an email and I my my
47:47
website was out at that time anyway I had an email from somebody that had come across my website and it said you know hey came across your website good job nice to see somebody you know,
47:56
drawn a fine tooth comb through things a little bit. Keep up the good work.” And I thought, “Oh, well, that’s nice.” And I looked at the signature and and uh the person that signed it,
48:05
it said it said Hugh Ainsworth. And I thought, “Hu gosh, that name sounds really familiar
48:10
to me.” And so I goo maybe he’s part of the community or something. Hugh Ainsworth JFK. Oh, Hugh Ainssworth. Yeah, a morning Dallas Morning News reporter who is the only person
48:20
in history who was there when Kennedy was shot, was there when Oswald was arrested, and was there when Oswald was was shot by Ruby. Like, wow. And so, I thought it was a joke, right? And I thought,
48:31
so I wrote him back and I said, “Oh, I’ve you’re somebody I’ve always wanted to talk to. Um, is there a ch time that we could talk at some point?” So, I get a number and sure enough, it’s a Dallas
48:40
number. And so I called it and then probably had a 10 or 15 minute conversation with you and we talked about Judith Very Baker because her book had just came out and and things. And so anyway,
48:51
um right around that that same time is when um the Discovery Channel had had reached out,
48:58
Robert Ericson from the Discovery Channel and they had come across the article that I’d done on on the entrance wound location for the first shot at at the base of the neck and they said, “We’ve
49:08
looked everywhere. this is the only thing that seems to have, you know, tackled that subject.
49:13
And so we we’re going to do a show on the magic bullet and we would like to include that. And so,
49:19
uh, they hired a film crew out of Omaha. Uh, Robert flew in and then I had one of one of our
49:25
clients at the office who was about the same size as Bill as Kennedy. We spent about 12 hours in the office one day. Anyway, he asked me, this is a long answer to a simple question. Um he asked me
49:35
the same question and I and I said it’s the single bullet fact. You know it’s what do I think about
49:43
it? It’s a fact. Nothing else makes any sense. It’s not you know I don’t know what else to call
49:48
it. Um so that’s my thought on it. Yeah. No, I I I agree. Um so uh what you know what other ballist
49:59
did you do any other ballistic tests? I mean you you have a you have a man car and a rifle. Did you
50:04
uh Yeah. So I did the first thing on my list was right. It was only one person in the history of
50:12
the whole world has ever fired this thing three times in under six seconds and he was some sort
50:17
of you know FBI super marksman right was is the narrative that’s out there. And I thought okay
50:24
well let’s start there. Um and I I you know I shot guns. I grew up I hunted. I mostly shotguns and
50:30
pheasant hunting and stuff, but so I bought one um took it out one day and I I put up a paper target
50:37
on a box at 85 yards. Okay. And I I didn’t have a window or boxes to lean on to shoot through.
50:44
So I just got down on one knee, so arguably a more unstable position. And I thought, well,
50:50
I’m just going to try to shoot three times. Now, at this point in time, the gun I had just had the gun for maybe a month or something, and I hadn’t sighted in the scope on it. So, I thought, well,
50:58
I’ll just use the iron sights. And so, I put three shells in it, got down on a knee, and fired three times. And if I remember right, I hit the target three times. And then I videotaped it, and it was
51:08
like 5.8 seconds. And I’m like, well, this wasn’t that difficult, you know? I think it’s merely for
51:14
a lack of trying that it’s so hard, you know? So, um, so it kind of started there and then,
51:22
um, you know, there’s a lot of debate on what do the bullets do, right? What are they, well,
51:27
they’re designed to hold together, so why did the one that hit Kenny in the head break up into a million pieces and the one that went through his neck, you know, stayed intact? And so,
51:35
I think that’s that was kind of the fog that I was trying to work through, if you will. And so,
51:42
I I don’t know, I just I’d get an idea, I’d go do it. I’d take my lunch break and go and fire some bullets. I I um I wanted to see I wanted there was something about the you know the head wound
51:54
that intrigued me and I I at this point I don’t remember what but I ordered some synthetic bone
52:01
spheres and the these were like from Europe somewhere like a hundred bucks a piece or something and so I get these and I had this big five gallon bucket of of ballistic gelatin and I
52:11
had the FBI’s recipe and all that stuff and so I filled these things up with gelatin and and I went
52:17
out and put a a cardboard box uh with a bunch of polyester uh stuffing in it and stuck it behind it
52:26
and you know went and I shot and then videotaped it and it didn’t explode and I oh my goodness I
52:32
can’t that I can’t ever let that one go public you know right um the reality was is that the
52:38
thickness of those spheres it’s like 7 millimeters or something and where Kennedy got hit in the
52:43
back of the head it’s thicker than that it’s probably more dense than that it’s a polyurethane um stuff that I was shooting at. So So I thought, “Okay, I’ll try it again.” I went to uh the the
52:55
hardware store somewhere and I picked up some little square quarterinch tiles, you know, and I duct taped one to the front of it and then took a shot at it and that thing absolutely exploded
53:06
um into a million pieces and um but all I was a So then I took it and I and I x-rayed it and
53:14
so I could see the fragment pattern if there was a pattern. There wasn’t. It was kind of all over the place. Um, and then I dissolved the the gelatin and took out all the the metal particles and dug
53:26
through the box and you know and I put ordered them all biggest to smallest on an X-ray plate and x-rayed it. And some of these things I think became images on my website or something. But I,
53:36
you know, it was just it was just, you know, the the nerdy professor kind of guy coming up with
53:41
ideas and and testing them. But, you know, I learned an awful lot about that gun and and about the bullets and what they do and what they don’t do. And it just it helped improve my
53:52
um you know my my my my working thesis on on what I thought happened I guess. Yeah, there was a lot
53:59
of lot of bullets spent doing a lot of things. So So can a fully jacketed uh am round of ammunition
54:06
uh produce fragments when hitting a skull? Oh yeah, absolutely. I mean I mean some people say
54:13
it’s impossible. Yeah, it’s not. I mo most of the time when I get challenged on that, I I invite the
54:20
person up here and and tell them that I, you know, I’ll I’ll just place it on the side here. You’ll
54:28
be fine. But if you want to be the target and back it up, we can do that. you know, where the guns,
54:35
you know, the I think I think it’s probably a half dozen times I’ I’ve done something like that
54:41
where I’ve invited somebody, somebody had a claim about the gun, right? And and I’ll say, you know,
54:47
I’ve got one. I’ve got I’ve got ammunition, you know, you you get that plane ticket, you can stay at my house and we’ll go and test your ideas. Nobody’s ever took me up on it. No,
54:56
unfortunately not. That’s too bad. Okay. So, look, you know, is there is there anything else I didn’t
55:03
cover on on the autopsy materials that you want to you want to bring up? Um, gosh, let me kind of
55:12
touch on some of it. Like, I know there might be some people out there that that that talk about uh
55:18
it’s about a centimeter below the cowic entrance where the where there’s a fracture there and they
55:24
talk about there being um like a bullet fragment right there. Okay. And um it’s not B. It wasn’t
55:31
metal. Um it was actually a little piece of bone that had broke off when when the skull fractured.
55:39
Um, and I was read looking at this earlier today that what was really strange about that is that
55:45
the the same, you know, pathologists were looking at those in the 1970s and didn’t know what it was,
55:52
you know, which goes back to my whole point is I I just don’t think the education was the same back
55:57
then. Um, now we could talk that is there still inklings going on about the orientation of that
56:05
F8 photograph? Well, I’m sure that I I never understood that to be honest. It’s beyond my understanding as a mere mortal, but uh yes, I’m sure that they’re still going on about it how it
56:14
proves uh you front. We So, when we finally got to that photograph and we were at the, you know,
56:22
that the whole the big question, right, it was uh you know, am I going to win my own mental jackpot
56:28
here uh and and have, you know, figured this out by looking at this black and white or not?
56:33
And and so anyway, we got to that photograph and we looked at it and there was probably a 5-second
56:39
pause and I was I looked at Larry and I’m like, “Holy crap.” And he’s like, “What?” I said I said, “There’s his cheek.” And he goes, “What?” And I said, “Right there. That’s his cheek.” Okay.
56:48
And so when you’re looking at that photograph the correct way, President Kennedy’s cheek is here and
56:54
he has that kind of nice orangish little tan, you know, and you could see it right there. You could see fuzz from the sideburn and the and some of the ear. And um and then you could see his upper
57:05
trap muscle right here. And then one of the in one frame the camera had kind of moved like this
57:11
and you had an expanded view of this area and you could you could actually see atapost tissue from
57:17
when they had likely done the dissection through his neck trying to find where the where the bullet
57:22
went, you know. And I I thought, “Oh my good, you know, the the thought you mentioned about, you know, why don’t they release these things?” And, you know, certain things like that would finally
57:31
go away if they would release one of the color images of it. It was clearly a picture taken from
57:36
the front. Um, I came I came back from there and I was so upset by it because it was so obvious. And
57:46
at so later in life I I worked for a company that was a franchise and they would have their annual
57:53
conventions every year in Dallas. And one time I went down there u I would take small groups down
57:59
there um and give them a little tour or whatever. And anyway, I was down there one day and and
58:05
Robert Groden was down there on a Saturday selling his wares, you know, and oh, I I had it took every
58:13
ounce of my my willpower not to confront him on that because and I should I I regret it because
58:20
I I left there and I said, you know, next year when I go down to this, I’m gonna do it this time,
58:26
right? Uh, I ended up leaving the company and they they moved the annual event anyway to Memphis or
58:33
somewhere or Nashville and I never got it done. But there’s no way anybody can look at the color
58:40
version of that photograph and come away with the belief that it’s of the back of the head. Not one way. Anybody, Mantic, um, uh, Groden, any of these guys, Gary Agalar, they’re lying. They’re
58:55
absolutely lying. Is there just one photograph or is there more or more than one photo? No, there’s more than there’s I don’t know. There were three maybe three of them or four of them. I can’t
59:03
remember. There were two at least. I know that for sure, right? Because they were numbers 44 and 45, I think. But, you know, my my challenge has been for years that if that if you’ve seen
59:13
that photograph and you’re convinced that it’s of the back of the head, I will meet you at the
59:18
archives with the camera crew, okay? we’ll go into this thing together and discuss, you know,
59:24
because I I it I cannot understand how anybody who’s seen the color version of that believes that
59:31
that’s on the back of the head without just pure deceit. Right. Right. Okay. Well, that’s I mean,
59:40
if I if I can say it stronger, I would. I don’t know how, but Oh, yeah. Can say it stronger. So,
59:48
I mean, I think I think covering covering that is good. So on yeah and that’s why I do wish
59:54
this stuff would come out because I think that it’s some some more expert analysis of people who
1:00:01
really perhaps can’t go to the archives or can’t uh can’t get there to actually them. I I mean I
1:00:07
think the personally I think um the thing that used to drive me in that argument was that you
1:00:14
had you know depending on the polls 60 to 80% of Americans uh believing that there was a conspiracy
1:00:21
and that that conspiracy somehow involved their own government right and and so when you have such
1:00:27
a impressionable uh group of people of such size things that aren’t true that lead to things like
1:00:38
that can cause people to do awful things in name of government hatred, right? And releasing things
1:00:46
out there to satisfy um some of that I think would would eliminate some of that. But yeah, that I
1:00:53
mean I remember that being the motivator for me, but you know, I can understand where the Kennedy family comes from too. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. For sure. I mean, I think that people were pretty
1:01:02
upset when the RFK’s autopsy photographs were released um in that last round of documents from
1:01:09
the Trump administration and and uh the Kennedy family, I mean, I think RFK Jr. said, “Okay.” But
1:01:15
I think the other parts of the members of the family uh were appalled that that came out. I
1:01:20
can understand. I mean, it’s it’s a it’s for me to sit here um as somebody, you know, I was minus 11
1:01:28
years old when Kennedy was killed, right? I wasn’t even born yet. You know, for me to sit and try to stomp my feet and justify something to be released um speaks of a certain um you know, personal
1:01:40
arrogance that my need to know is greater than a family’s need to remain private, you know, but
1:01:51
two sides of the coin, you know. Yeah, for sure. Okay. Well, thank you very much
1:01:56
uh for being on on the trail of delusion and um well I’m when I post I’m going to you know
1:02:03
when this posts I’m sure this will get a lot of comments and people will be uh probably quite upset and I’ll probably get some private emails from probably a few people you know. Yeah. Well,
1:02:14
but um the only way you get through uh the truth to anything is to actually discuss
1:02:19
it with somebody. So hopefully there’s fruitful discussions in there somewhere. Yep. Heat. Heat.

www.mattkprovideo.com/2025/08/10/ghosts-of-iron-mountain-episode-18-on-the-trail-of-delusion/

JFK assassination expert Fred Litwin (www.onthetrailofdelusion.com/) and Author Phil Tinline discuss his new book “Ghosts of Iron Mountain“

https://a.co/d/blApz9d

TRANSCRIPT:

Well, welcome to another edition of On the Trail of Delusion,
where I try to separate fact from fiction and try to offer some something substantial, typically on the JFK assassination
More substantial than what you’ll find on the internet, find on YouTube,
And try to get away from some of the conspiracy nonsense that is all over the place.

So, I’m delighted today to have as my guest Mr. Phil Tinline who is from the United Kingdom, who has just written this absolutely amazing book basically called
Ghost of Iron Mountain.

Now, you may not know what Iron Mountain is, and you’re going to find out,
But this is a very important book. And let me tell you a bit about Phil before we get into this. So,
1:25
Phil is a a freelance writer and documentarian.
He’s the author of The Death of Consensus, which was chosen as the Times, as London’s politics book of the year.
He’s produced documentaries for the BBC, and he’s written for the Guardian, The Daily Telegraph, The New Statesman, and a variety of other publications.
And he’s a graduate of Oxford University. And so, welcome to On the Trail of Delusion.
Thank you. Great to be here. So, um, Phil, if you just want to tell us a bit about how you got interested in in this topic, what what drove you to write this book.
Well, I had a a much
2:00
more grandiose idea for a book. Um, which I was researching. Uwhat that was going to be about,
2:05
I may still get to write it maybe one day. uh it was about the kind of uh moments of crisis that
2:11
had produced various sort of shocks and fears that I thought um and I still think make up the
2:16
building blocks of conspiracy theory. So why do we think of of crowds as infinitely manipulable sheeple? Well, I think it has something to do with the the reaction on the right of the
2:24
Paris Commune. Why do we have this idea of false consciousness? Partly the far less reaction in
2:29
Germany to the failure of the Spartist revolt in 1919. Anyway, I was looking at this kind of thing. I was looking particularly at the idea of the another element of the kind of standard conspiracy
2:38
theory movie we all have in our heads as well as the sheeple and the plucky maverick. You obviously have to have the dark cabal. So where does this idea come from? So I was spent sitting
2:47
one Saturday afternoon looking uh at uh political science books from the 1960s as you do on a sunny
2:52
day uh looking for the phrase military industrial complex. And I found plenty of course, but I also
2:58
found three books that mentioned pretty much in in immediate succession uh this thing called Report
3:03
from Iron Mountain. I thought, what’s this? Uh was particularly curious and intriguing because one seemed to suggest it was real, one seemed to suggest it was fake and one wasn’t sure. So
3:12
that’s I looked it up. There’s a few paragraphs on Wikipedia and I I basically just wrote at the top of my notes, this is a really good story. It was kind of thing I’ve been looking for for
3:20
a very long time because I’ve been, you know, making documentaries, as you said, writing in this sort of post-war territory for a long time. But you’re always looking for a story that’s got
3:30
the the sort of the compelling sort of narrative drive that you want to keep the reader going,
3:36
but there’s a strong enough structure you can hang some serious ideas on it. It’s not just a lucky anecdote. So, I was very lucky to come across it. Yeah. No, absolutely. So, so why don’t you tell
3:45
us a bit about what is you know Iron Mountain the book and you know who wrote it and and why
3:51
did they write it? Okay. So, uh this goes back to the Vietnam War. Uh and we need to go to a little
3:58
office of a satire magazine called Monle. nothing to do with the current much smarter Monle magazine
4:04
at the bottom of Fifth Avenue just near Greenwich Village and these three young satists led by Vixon Naski later of the nation magazine uh sitting there looking at the papers and at this point the
4:14
Vietnam War is just really beginning to hot up but it looks briefly like there might be an outbreak
4:20
of peace and these three young guys are rather startled to see in the papers that the reaction on Wall Street to this has not been as you might expect uh joy it’s actually been basically fear
4:31
there’s been a so-called peace scare and so shares have dipped and they think firstly this is a bit
4:36
strange and then pretty quickly ah this gives us an idea because they’re always got their satirical
4:41
eye looking for ideas so they think what if we came up with the story of the suppression of a
4:47
top secret government report which has been supposedly commissioned by Robert McNamara uh during the Kennedy administration to scope out with a team of of uh top experts what would happen
4:58
to America if permanent global peace broke out. The joke being it would destroy the economy and
5:03
wreck society and you’d have to have all sorts of horrific things to replace the beneficial effects of war. You might have to have sophisticated form of slavery to keep young men under control and
5:11
maybe get them to play blood games. Uh you might have to reintroduce eugenics, poison the rivers to unite people around the threat to the environments and all these sort of you know comically horrific
5:20
things. But they publish it uh with the help of of a very enterprising 60s publisher, the Dial Press,
5:26
uh where the editor, by the way, is Eel Doro, soon to be famous. Um as a novelist in his own right,
5:33
um they publish it as as though it’s real on their non-fiction list and the D press don’t tell their sales staff that it’s not real. So this is published uh and of course the New York Times
5:42
phone up phones up the White House and says, “Is this real?” And of course the White House have to say, “Well, we don’t know. We better check.” And there’s a series of of checks in the White House,
5:51
in the Pentagon, and the Arms Control and Disarmment Agency where people kind of have to work out whether this extraordinary outrageous document is real or not. And and people begin to
6:00
think like this can’t be real. And eventually the the White House report, I’ve got the memo going up to President Johnson says, “No, we’re pretty sure this is a hoax.” But officials are
6:08
still whispering to journalists, this is kind of how people think in here. So, you know, there’s a kind of a an ambiguity, which is exactly what they wanted because the the thing that I’ve
6:17
missed out from that story is they didn’t just come up with the story of the uh the suppression of this report. They commissioned a writer called Leonard Leuen, who was a bit older than Victor
6:25
Naski and his uh his comrades uh who was a satist as well. Uh and he said, well, if I’m going to
6:31
write this the story of the suppression of this report, I need to write the actual report. That’s why there’s all this this detail. And that’s the book that’s published as report from Iron Mountain
6:39
on the possibility and desiraability of peace. Anyway, um Leuen says later when he eventually
6:45
confesses after the Pentagon papers are published in 1972, I think and he he basically says reality
6:50
has has trumped uh for one of a better verb, reality has trumped satire. Uh that what we were
6:56
looking for is just this moment of uncertainty where people would ask themselves, could this possibly be true? Because once they’re asking that question, they’ll ask it about other things,
7:04
too. And so that’s the first moment. And we can perhaps go on to talk about its later surprise ramifications, but that’s that’s where it comes from from this uh this moment at the end of the
7:12
60s which is simultaneously very deeply political and still kind of lacky. So So and and so Leonard
7:19
Leuen actually admitted back early early days that it was a hoax. Absolutely. Wrote an article in the
7:26
New York Times book review which I was very pleased to uh see reviewing my book kindly um many years later. But yeah, I read a piece in the New York Times book review saying that uh that it
7:35
was a hoax and this is why. So, so there it is. You know, he’s he says that and yet and yet all
7:41
of a sudden, you know, this gets picked up by all sorts of people. Um including so, you know, uh Fletcher Prrowy. Um you know, I’ve I’ve written a lot about Fletcher Prrowy and and uh I mean,
7:53
what a what a character in so many ways. And um and I wrote about Iron Mountain, the fact
7:58
that he was fooled by this um despite the fact it was quite openly a hoax. Yes. And what’s so
8:05
extraordinary is that he knows that Luen has said that he made it up, but he’s his belief that this
8:12
is the evidence of the the dark cabal uh is so strong the confirmation bias I think is so strong
8:19
that he interprets Lein saying that as basically well he he has to say that it’s a cover story or
8:24
he had to present it as a novel. His evidence and this is the huge sort of inescapable irony of it.
8:30
His evidence is that having worked in the Pentagon because we should say you know prudy is a serious guy you know works in at least initially you know he works in the air force he works in the Pentagon
8:39
he’s the liaison with the CIA eventually retires around the time of the Kennedy assassination and
8:44
then becomes a conspiracy theorist later but um but no he he is um so kind of convinced that there
8:50
is this dark cabal that he he convinces himself that Louis is saying this as a cover story because
8:56
partly he remembers he says how people used to talk in the Pentagon and he says, “Well, this is exactly how these guys taught, so therefore it must be real.” So the the acuity and accuracy of
9:05
Louisian’s satire becomes evidence somehow that it’s not. And and even even I mean I I I mean
9:11
later on I think uh Proud would actually deny it. I never really believed it was real, you know. I
9:17
think he actually denied it later on even though if you read his books it’s pretty clear he thought
9:22
it was he thought it was real or really accepted it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And there’s a there’s a point where um uh yeah, he he does an interview in 1991 at the National Press Club and so on. Yeah.
9:31
No, he um he he for a long time he certainly said that it was he he thought it was real. It
9:36
couldn’t not be because it spoke so clearly to what he heard in the Yeah. You know, I I found
9:41
uh I found a letter that he wrote to the uh the um the IHR the the Willis Cardo’s uh Holocaust denial
9:49
review where he basically said, “I love I love your journal, you know, and and uh it’s really you’re doing some very very important work and yeah, it’s and because I don’t I mean, you tell
10:00
me you’ll have a better view on this than me, but I I don’t think that he was an anti-semite,
10:06
at least front and center and overtly. I think he was just somebody who was very became very very
10:11
focused on trying to understand what this sort of strange sort of national security world that he’d been part of for a very long time really consisted of and I think he was also frankly
10:22
uh as a lot of I think conspiracy theorists have he had a sort of curious respect for the pattern
10:27
of authority so the fact that the IHR was called the institute for historical review rather than
10:33
holocaust denial grand central you know somehow was enough to convince him that it was proper just as with the thought, you know, the tone of it and the title of it and convince them was real,
10:41
too. Well, I’m amazed at how easy it is to convince him of stuff. But one thing I I did find, I found a letter that he wrote. Um I found this at the archives. Um he wrote a letter, I think it
10:51
was to Richard Sprag or something else, but he basically was talking about uh some of the the arms um some of the control elements of of of the arms that the Pentagon was using. And uh remember
11:02
they had the Awax and it was controlled um it was a it was a control system controlled from the ground or something and he was he actually wrote a letter and he said he says in the letter he what
11:12
if the person on the ground is a Jewish sergeant and it was one of the only because I think he was
11:18
very careful about if he was an anti-semit he was very careful about not being very overt about his
11:24
anti-semitism and this is the only time I think I caught him in something that was very very um
11:30
overt I couldn’t believe this It’s on my website. It’s quite a quite an amazing letter. Yeah. No,
11:35
no, absolutely. I mean, whereas the people that he was talking to, Willis Caro, who you mentioned, who’s the sort of um Emil’s Gre hovering behind the IHR and Spotlight magazine and all these other
11:45
uh noai press and and so on and so on. Um is, you know, not a man who is afraid of um putting his uh
11:52
due hatred front and center. I mean, apparent you supposedly had four bust of Hitler in his office, so you know, fairly unamiguous. So before we get on to to the uh to Willis Cardo which is
12:02
a fascinating story uh perhaps you could tell us a bit about Cight Mills who basically some of the
12:09
some of the philosophy that sort of goes into the book or that they the fact that Luen draws
12:14
a lot on crit mills for what’s in the book. Maybe you could talk a bit about that. Sure.
12:20
I mean I I I want to be careful about how much I can uh say for certain about how the direct
12:26
lines of inputs are often hard to to to prove and I cannot prove that I don’t think we need to but I I can’t prove that that Luren had read C right mills I asked his children about it they had no
12:35
recollection of that I think I spoke to Richard Lingerman one of the the one of the three sat young satists who was still around as I was doing my interviews uh and I think he said he had a if I
12:46
recall correctly he had a vague recollection of looking at CR Mills but you know he’s in 90s and asking someone to remember exactly what they read half a century ago is a tough call,
12:53
right? So I think what we can say though is that Cight Mills was the single figure who more than
13:00
anybody uh kind of pioneered and encapsulated uh the ideas that you know uh the report certainly
13:08
speaks to and is certainly a big influence on the new left which was one of the constituencies which found the report quite compelling. So Cide Mills is an extraordinary guy. I mean,
13:17
he’s born in Texas and doesn’t leave Texas until I think he’s 23 years old. He’s, you know, by default he’s heading towards a career possibly in the military as a kind of military academy and so
13:27
on. But he’s a very I mean, I’m not in a position to say really, but my impression is he’s a very
13:32
Texan guy. He’s a very he’s a very big physical guy. He’s uh not afraid to be violent. He’s very
13:38
proud of having kicked a racist in the face with both feet as a teenager. uh and he eventually
13:43
through his sort of you know rebelliousness and his his insistence on personal autonomy and and
13:48
self-exression really he ends up in a very different place. He ends up as a sociologist at Columbia University. Now most sociologists at Colombia and elsewhere in the 1950s are for
13:58
perfectly good reasons very careful very cautious very empirical kind of figures. Mills is a very
14:04
different character. Mills is very focused on the idea of power. uh he writes a book called White Color earlier in the 50s and then he writes this book in the mid1 1950s called the power elite
14:13
uh which is all about how uh a combination of the military and business and politicians in this new
14:19
national security world the sort of cold war world created by the uh like the dropping of the atomic
14:25
bomb in 1945 uh that this has become a very kind of tight uh centralized nexus of power. This cuts
14:32
absolutely against the sort of much more gentle pluralistic ideas of some of his colleagues who think American politics and democracy is pretty nicely balanced. And so this sense that there
14:41
is this kind of um not cabal but there is this nexus uh at the heart of power is a very powerful
14:47
one particularly in terms of understanding what becomes the military-industrial complex. Indeed that idea the military-industrial complex which was certainly known to nasi and luren and so on
14:57
uh I think we can show was influenced by the power release. is written that speech is partly written by a very interesting figure a guy called Malcolm Moose who’s a political
15:05
journalist a scientist excuse me he’s a political scientist and a journalist who was Eisenhower’s
15:12
speech writer and was reading mills we know he was reading mills and so you can see that idea appear
15:18
in the mouth of President Eisenhower and and the left to the great excitement of of you know the small American left in 1961 but anyway you have this idea of the power elite But Mills is also
15:30
friends and colleagues with Richard Hofstatter. He does of course the paranoid style in American politics speech coincidentally the night before Kennedy shot in Oxford. And so he’s talking to
15:40
Hofata and he’s being very careful not to be a conspiracy theorist. But once you go through those shocks in the in the 60s first of course the JFK assassination and then the advent then
15:50
the Gulf of Tonken and the advent of the Vietnam war in its full horrific flower. you start to get
15:56
people sliding across that line and thinking that actually the military-industrial complex is not this perfectly, you know, evidence-based analysis that Mills has talked about, but this,
16:05
you know, as you’re very familiar with, you know, from some of the conspiracy stuff, you know, this numminous dark cabal hovering omnipotently uh and invisibly behind everything. And so that’s where
16:15
where he fits in. But he’s dead by early 1962. He dies of a heart attack. So, you know, he doesn’t
16:20
even see the missile crisis, you know. So, he’s a kind of forefather. But I use him at the beginning of the book to try and set up some of the ground so that when I tell the story of the report, it’s
16:29
not just a kind of a a quirky anecdote. It sits in a political frame. So, so Iron Mountain, I mean,
16:37
the these these were leftists who really wrote or responsible for Iron Mountain, but what what
16:43
were they trying to accomplish? What were they hoping to accomplish with this with this book?
16:48
Well, what they were hoping to accomplish, as I say, as Leuen explains in his in his uh sort of sort of confessional article in 1972. I mean, it’s more ry than than, you know, fraud. Um,
16:59
but what he’s trying to achieve is a moment of uncertainty in people’s minds where they would ask themselves if this could possibly be true. And he goes to great lengths to write it in really kind
17:11
of convincingly dry Herman Khan think tank pros. you know, there’s a whole bunch of footnotes,
17:17
almost all of which are to real documents. He he sweated blood over this thing that by doing so, he
17:22
can make you think, if this is possibly real, what else do I need to question about the output of
17:31
the, you know, the military-industrial complex, of the Pentagon, of the the Johnston administration. So, it’s it’s trying to get he’s trying to get a moment of what you might call defamiliarization.
17:40
is trying to kind of stop the the the slow progress further and further into the sort
17:45
of depths of the Vietnam War and and indeed also into, you know, the nuclear deterrent as well. Uh
17:51
and try and get people to just step back and ask themselves, hang on, could this actually be mad.
17:58
So, so I you know I I understand the the book from from their particular viewpoint of how
18:05
um they could write that and think that you know there’s a lot of stuff that they they believe in. But how did this book get to be sort of a uh so important on the right? Well,
18:17
there’s a long period where it’s more or less forgotten. Um, you know, part of the thing that they’re satarizing is is the way that it appears at least that the Johnson administration is is
18:26
fighting war partly to sort of burn off excess surplus capital because America’s economy is
18:32
going gang busters for year after year after year through the 50s and 60s. Now you jump forward not very long after 1967 and having too much you know money having the government having too
18:42
much money sounds like a pretty good problem to have once you’ve gone through you know the the the bloodshed and horrors of 1968-69 you know the assassination of Martin Luther King Robert
18:51
Kennedy and the massacre of Mi and the news of that breaking then the massacre at Kent State the killing of Fred Hampton the you know the black panthers the weather underground this whole kind
19:00
of you know rupture in American life which follows very quickly after this then into the world of Watergate then into the world of stagflation and the energy crisis. All of this seems like
19:09
a very good problem to have. So the idea that this satire is something that’s still current and sort of fades away and by 1980 it’s gone out of print. Lumen tries to get it republished in the 80s. G
19:18
JK Galraith who’d also been involved is ready to help but publishers are not interested. This is
19:24
a relic from the past. But then in 1990 he gets told by two different acquaintances that actually
19:29
it has been republished. It’s just as we’ve been discussing. It’s been republished by basically fascists who think it’s real. Now the reason for that is significantly down to Fletcher priority.
19:39
You know he had discovered it. He thought that it was real. Uh and you know he was ready to to pass
19:45
it on to these guys. It seems like 19 there was you can see a tiny bit of interest before this.
19:51
I think there’s a you know proto militia type group in Arkansas that contacts Luen in the late 80s. But it seems like it’s the end of the Cold War that does this. Now at one level this makes
20:00
no sense at all because if this committee is all about how we must never have peace it seems a bit
20:06
of a leap to suggest that the end of the cold war is encried by the same people right that doesn’t matter in prud’s head at all because uh what he’s interested in fundamentally I think this is
20:16
the best kind of coherence I can find in it is in evidence of this dark cabal and it kind of doesn’t
20:21
matter whether they’re pro peace or antipace the point is that they’re there and when you have this surprising jarring you know almost shock rupture of the end of the cold war where suddenly
20:32
the Soviet Union becomes an American ally after 40 years of the direct opposite. You know Saddam
20:38
Hussein in a smaller scale way goes from being an ally to being an enemy. you know, if you’re going
20:44
for a conspiracist mindset like Prudy is, you you you make sense of it, you know, on the basis that
20:49
this is all pre-planned and he has a complicated theory about David Rockefeller, which we don’t need to get into, but that’s basically the spur. I think is 1989. There’s a guy at the noonai press
21:00
who contacts Prud at least it looks like that from the letters. It’s not absolutely certain. It’s an ambiguity. But anyway, Prudy sends them a copy of the um of the book and because you know products
21:11
of the American government are non-copyright, they’re public domain, they think, well, okay, we can just publish this. They literally tear off the cover, you know, photocopy it, print it, put a
21:20
new copy on it, a new cover on it, which says, you know, is this brilliant satire or new protocols?
21:26
Um rather giving away their their, you know, their slant on these things. And it’s republished. Um,
21:32
and that’s when Luen finds out about it cuz they’re advertising in Spotlight magazine and he has to spend four years trying to get them to stop. So this is where, you know, the public the
21:42
publish it comes out and this is where Mark Lane comes into the picture, you know, and I’ve written
21:48
I’ve written a lot about Mark Lane, right? And so there there he is in the middle of this sort of
21:53
uh I guess defending the publication of of uh Iron Mountain by uh by Willis Cardo’s group. Yes. Well,
22:01
so Lane and also the the the you know very brave uh black comedian civil rights campaigner Dick
22:08
Gregory are the two guys who in a way literally embody the political shift we’re talking about.
22:15
you know, they go from being, you know, left-wing uh or in in Lane’s case at least liberal left
22:21
uh you know, campaigners in the 1960s and effectively partly at least through the vector
22:28
of JFK conspiracy theory slide. I mean, I’m not saying that Gregory actually becomes rightwing,
22:33
but he’s certainly in with these people. Lane, I think effectively does to all intents and purposes, you know, through the course of the 1970s. you know, he’s involved with Jim Jones.
22:41
He’s involved with Martin Luther King, conspiracy theory and all sorts. Uh he in due time becomes
22:47
the lawyer for Willis Cartau’s very far-right group. His office is in the same building just
22:52
behind the Library of Congress. Um and so when the lawyers for Leonard Lewin start writing to these
22:58
people basically saying cease and desist, this is not your property. You’re not to publish it. uh the first lawyer to emerge and to write back is none other than you know 60s liberal hero
23:08
Mark Lane which is you know I think as I say a great embodiment of of this weird slippage
23:14
and and in fact uh I think it was Chip Berlet who wrote an article about Fletcher Prrowy for the progressive saying this guy is a con Fletcher Prrowy was a conspiracy theorist of the right so
23:25
to speak. Yeah. No, exactly. And and I think Bas also pointed out that that there is an article I
23:31
I haven’t read it, I will confess about it, that that the John Burch Society was sort of fastening on to JFK conspiracy theory pretty much at the end of the 60s. You know, it’s it’s it has
23:41
quite a long sort of history because and this is again where Mills is interesting, I think,
23:46
because I think, you know, I don’t want to say that the left and right are precisely equivalent. You can get very sort of fasile on that very quickly. But I do think it is fair to say that
23:57
uh that sort of centralized nexus of power that Mills describes is something that to to sort
24:03
of maverick leftists like him is very alienating and very much to be something to be treated with
24:08
suspicion and weariness. There is a very similar or at least analogist feeling on the right that
24:14
the the centralization of power in Washington is not what the republic was founded to be. You know, the whole states rights thing is very much against that. The whole idea of of you know the freedom of
24:24
the businessman is very much against that. And frankly the freedom to be racist is you know is
24:29
against that. You you know you obviously through all those battles in the early 60s you have this strange thing where the federal government is siding with the most disempowered people in the
24:36
country against the state governments in places like Alabama and Mississippi and Arkansas. And
24:42
so you have this curious kind of triangulation. But no I think there is something logical about it. I mean, it’s not a view that I share at all, but there is something logical about the way that
24:52
centralized power looks pretty scary to both the right and the left. Yeah. And and and of course,
24:58
you see it right now in the JFK assassination where you have uh the right is going on about the deep state killed Kennedy. And in fact, they’ll even tell you that the deep state killed Robert
25:08
Kennedy and and uh and say you you’ve got people like, you know, Jefferson Mley going on Steve
25:14
Bannon show um and they’re in complete agreement about a whole variety of things. Yeah. And and
25:20
and you and it extends beyond conspiracy theory as well. If you look at I don’t know if you’ve read um Cash Patel’s uh noted volume government gangsters uh but that talks about you know
25:30
the FBI bugging of Martin Luther King in outraged terms you know that sense to say from the right
25:37
as well as from the left that that the state you know and it’s not based on nothing you know the state did do some pretty tough stuff in bad stuff in the 60s and 70s but yeah exactly and I think it
25:46
is very very interesting the way that the sort of Trumpian writers embrace conspiracy theory I wrote a piece a couple of years ago off the back of my trip to Dallas for my research for the for the
25:54
book. Um talked to a young journalist um Michael Williams who reported on extraordinary events
26:00
that had taken place literally on the grassy null where people were expecting Kennedy to come back or possibly Jon Kennedy Jr. to come back or you know maybe Trump was Jon Kennedy Jr. and there’s
26:10
a woman who was who was dressed in sort of Captain America costume who was there who I believe was
26:15
also uh present at Jan 6 uh in in the capital. say, “No, there’s a very strong read across. It’s
26:21
rather striking.” Yeah. Yeah. I was in Daily Plaza a couple years ago and and I was talking to some of the QAnon people um on the Grassy Null and and uh it was very very weird and strange, you know,
26:33
to see them there. I mean, what a collection of people on the Grassy Null. Um yeah, but anyways,
26:39
so you know, I’m I’m I’m fascinated by Willis Cardo and and his stuff and and so where does
26:45
it go from there? I mean he he republishes it and uh and embraces Iron Mountain and
26:50
then it where does it go from there? Well, so there’s a couple of different places it goes. One place is a movie that I believe you may be familiar with uh Olive as JFK
27:02
um Prudi is the um is the central figure in the I would argue is the central scene in the movie.
27:09
the the scene where Donald Sutherland absolutely brilliant performance and a brilliant piece of montaging at the editing level by Stone Oliver Stone explains not just the how Mr. Garrison but
27:20
the why. Why did Kennedy have to be killed and it’s it’s you know its climax is basically not
27:26
forbaiting but is pretty close to articles that Stone had seen uh by in the mid1 1980s
27:34
explaining the Kennedy assassination through report from my mountain. this whole idea that war is the basic social system, you know, the the the the organizing principle of society,
27:43
Mr. Garrison, is for war, you know, and that’s why the president has to be killed because the Vietnam war is is necessary to the milit industrial complex and to the CIA, you know,
27:52
so that feeds directly into the movie. Now, that is not to say I should stress that that makes the film a far-right film. It is not a far-right film. It is a conspiracist film. I mean, you know,
28:00
as much as anything is of the left, but it’s it’s certainly the reporter is certainly present there and, you know, proves he was somebody that that stained sort of triumphantly, you know,
28:08
almost revealed not quite up from under a cloth, but, you know, on a day at I think the National Press Club on C-SPAN not long afterwards amid all the halaloo about the film and its use of evidence
28:17
and so on. That’s not the only place it goes. It also finds its way into the militia movement. This comes out uh which is obviously developing around this time and it’s h it comes out after
28:28
a journalist who I spoke to through Wall Street Journal journalist uh called Robert Tomshow who
28:33
was based in Dallas went up to Oklahoma after the the bombing of Oklahoma the the the Mura building
28:39
in Oklahoma City on April 19th, 1995 and he starts asking around and he goes out to see a couple of
28:46
militia guys in the woods in Euphora in the east of the state And uh they say you know have you
28:53
read report from Iron Mountain? Have you read report from I mountain? This is the explanation. So you know and not not the explanation for the bombing I should say but the explanation for our
29:00
our deep profound suspicion and hostility towards Washington to the point of you know being ready to to fight to defend ourselves against the the onslaught of the new world order and the one world
29:09
government uh which they’re expecting any day. Um so it’s it becomes one of the the founding
29:14
texts of certainly strong elements in the militia movement. But there’s a whole other and I could go on all day about this so I shall try and be succinct. There’s a whole other hoax which is
29:24
written which is partly inspired by a report from my mountain called silent weapons for quiet wars
29:30
which is proletized by Milton William Cooper one of the great sort of uh gurus of conspiracy theory
29:36
in the 80s and 90s and he publishes this book in he sorry he publishes both extracts from my
29:41
mountain and the whole of silent weapons for quiet wars which is a supposed sort of manual for the elite to manipulate the sheeple uh in his book behold a pale horse which I understand is the
29:50
most shoplifted book in America. Uh, also has big influence on the X-Files. It influences rappers. There’s even a rapper who calls himself William Cooper. You can see traces of it in Qanon and so
29:59
on and so on. It sort of what happens is it sort of ramifies and dilutes and spreads through the culture and you can see signs of it today. Yeah. Uh, by the way, just on on going back to Oliver
30:09
Stone, I have a I have a memo uh that was I mean there was a bruha about Fletcher Prrowy and his
30:15
association with Willis Cardo back when the movie came out, but I have a memo um that I got um at
30:22
Baylor University from Jane Rusone who was Oliver Stone’s research person saying we have a problem
30:29
here with um with with Fletcher and and and his association with Willis Cardo and the fact that
30:36
there. This anti-semitism is real and I’ve closed this article from the Guardian and we we we’ve
30:41
got to deal with this. This is a big problem. And I have I I’ve quoted the memo. I I have
30:46
not published the actual memo because I’m worried about copyright because it’s an Oliver Stone memo.
30:52
But there it was from his own research assistant saying we have a big problem here with Fletcher.
30:57
Yeah. Well, exactly. And and you you have this extraordinary um part of the whole story with
31:02
Harold, forgive me, I’m going to hopefully get the name right. Harold Weisberg. Hierro Weisberg. Yes. Yeah. So, he was one of the Let me just take that again. Um, and you have this extraordinary
31:11
thing where one of the the founders really of JFK conspiracism in the 1960s, a guy who, you know,
31:18
like a quite a few of those people had been a sort of persecuted leftist in the 1950s. Uh, and so
31:24
very suspicious of, you know, of the centralized state. you know, this guy Harold Weisberg, who
31:29
is a very prolific conspiracist, publishes lots of books and writes more that weren’t published, you know, sees what what’s going on and and is is a ghast at it. I mean, he’s one of the people
31:38
who’s whose archive I drew on in the book and, you know, he he as an absolutely paid up conspir
31:44
with an eye on evidence, however much he may have been misreading it, is is a gasast at what Stone is doing. So I think yeah the combination of of conspiracy theories you know in a sort of
31:54
um omni omni theory in the film uh did upset people who were much closer to those beliefs than
32:01
you or I are. Yeah. In fact Harold Weisberg I I publish on my website a couple of massive letters
32:07
he wrote to Oliver Stone about Garrison and when and his involvement with the whole investigation
32:14
um etc etc. And he he actually in um Weisberg wanted to write a book with George Lardner who is
32:19
a Washington Post col journalist. They I actually have their outline for a book that they write about Garrison and Oliver Stone. U but of course Weisberg was hard to get along with and so they uh
32:31
as soon as they agreed on the outline they started fighting and and and Lardner said I just can’t I
32:36
can’t work with you. You know we we just can’t unfortunately do it. Right. Right. Because wasn’t didn’t Weisberg uh effectively leaked the script that he got hold of. Yeah, he leaked the script
32:46
to to to Lardner and and then of course Stone was all upset. Oh my god, you’re you’re criticizing
32:51
the movie before it even comes out. I mean this is just how how how insane you know and yes I mean
32:56
which one at one level I can understand but um but I mean why’s papers were very useful because one of the people who uh who contacts um Leuen and says you know you need to know that your book is
33:08
being advertised by basically fascists uh is a guy called L Arens uh who has a kind of exchange with
33:15
Weissberg and it’s it’s back to the you know the whole JFK thing about you know supposedly these various people who knew something about the assassination all mysteriously die and it can’t
33:23
be a coincidence and it’s what ends up as the parallax view effectively and Weissber is saying no no no no she really did just die she had a heart attack sack or whatever you know she wasn’t
33:31
sort of taken out so no Arens was was I think more more conspiracist than Weisber the gradations are
33:37
rather striking absolutely so just you know you go you talked about Bill Cooper I mean he’s a
33:44
very interesting character and and uh uh can you tell us a bit more about him in his book um what’s
33:49
what’s it called again his they hold a pale Yeah. So that that that book is uh I guess you can buy
33:54
it secondhand or whatever. There’s multiple editions of that book of sort of a collection of of a variety of articles and stuff. Yes. I mean including horrifically the protocols of the elves
34:05
of Zion where he says oh when it says Jews it means Illuminati which doesn’t really make it okay publishing the protocols at all obviously but um no Cooper is an interesting figure. I
34:15
think there’s actually a rhyme with Prowity in that I mean they’re different ages but you know Prowy is a veteran of the Second World War and Cooper is a veteran of the Vietnam War. You know
34:25
he was actually sailing a boat not far from the Gulf of Tonken you not at the time of the instant but you know he then works for an admiral uh in intelligence and he starts seeing a kind of gets
34:33
real cognitive dissonance from seeing you know Nixon saying one thing and he what the papers he’s seeing are saying something else but he’s also a guy who he’d grown up on military bases. I think
34:42
he’d had a pretty tough time with his dad. Uh, and his dad was was particularly loving father. Um,
34:49
and he had become, you know, once he leaves the military particularly, he became an alcoholic. It
34:54
sounds like he was pretty violent himself. I don’t know the detail of that, but um, there’s a great book by I think Mark Jacobson on on Cooper called Pale Horse Rider, which has much
35:03
more on it. Anyway, Cooper is somebody who is I think like uh Prrowy trying to make sense of their
35:11
time in the national security state and trying to make sense of what the national security state is in to but he he has a again rather like he has a rather sort of um self-creating relationship with
35:24
the truth let’s say so he will talk about how he was on a military base in I think Texas at the time of the Kennedy assassination and saw the assassination on TV and was really shocked. Well,
35:32
the assassination wasn’t the assassination itself wasn’t on TV until the Zabbr was on TV 12 years
35:38
later, right? Obviously, you have Kronhite on his phone saying what’s happened, but the footage was
35:43
not. So, you know, the the sense of the sort of the convenient story just taking precedence over
35:49
the messy truth is is a big part of his thinking. The other thing about him though is that he was a big promoter of UFO theories until he decided that actually that was all a ruse by the state to uh
36:01
pull the wool over the eyes of the sheeple. Uh and so he start and I think possibly he may have got that from looking at report from Iron Mountain which you know jokingly suggests UFO scares as
36:10
a way to unite people in the absence of war. So that I think if I recall correctly that’s one of the bits of Iron Mountain he puts in his report. So he’s a he’s a he’s a very problematic guy. time
36:20
and he ends up dying in a shootout with uh I think federal marshals over his refusal to pay his taxes
36:25
and he’s he’s sort of assaulted a local doctor in Arizona. He has a sort of little house on top
36:30
of a hill in a place called Eager and you know he broadcasts this extraordinary uh radio show
36:35
called the hour of the time which starts with the sound of basically the sound of a of a military
36:41
clampdown. You know dogs barking and children screaming and marching and so on. He he lived very
36:46
much in the world of, you know, imminent tyranny the whole time. I think I think I think I think
36:52
he believed I think Cooper believed that Greer, the Secret Service agent, shot JFK. Um, you know,
36:59
he had that belief in from watching the Zaprruder film. I mean, it was really bizarre belief. Yeah,
37:05
he had I think it was the the Yeah, an alien had sort of shot Kennedy or something. I mean, yes. I
37:11
mean, it’s it’s sort of and and I’ll tell you a funny story about UFOs. I mean, you have Sylvia Maher, who was one of the the major uh critics of the Warren Report, uh back in in early 1965,
37:23
she had a meeting in her uh apartment in New York of other people who were interested in criticizing
37:28
the Warren Report. And uh so there like 10 12 people and Edward J. Epstein comes to that
37:35
meeting and he’s walking around her apartment and he looks in at her bookshelf and there’s all these
37:40
books on UFOs and and his heart just sunk when he when he realized, oh my god, who am I really
37:48
dealing with here? Well, right and I think he is a really impressive and interesting figure in this
37:53
story because, you know, he along with Lane is one of the two people who first goes to print, right?
38:00
They’re pretty arguably pretty much the two people who launch, you know, booklength JFK uh conspiracy
38:06
theory. But I think Epstein takes the idea of theory a little bit more seriously than most
38:11
so-called conspiracy theorists, right? And that he keeps testing it and he eventually, as far as I can tell, comes to the conclusion that actually, you know, it doesn’t really hold up after spending
38:20
enormous amounts of of time on it to the rather sort of the constonation of some of the people concerned. And it’s striking that um Epstein is one of the people who calls out Stone’s use of
38:30
Report for Iron Mountain at the time of the film coming out. There’s an article in the Atlantic if I remember rightly. And there’s this this um round this sort of panel discussion at town hall
38:40
uh just off Broadway this theater which is chaired by Victor Nvaski who’d come up with report from
38:46
my mountain which has Epstein on stage has Christopher Hitchens on stage has Stone himself has Norman Maylor has Norah Efron and so on where they’re discussing you know fact fiction and and
38:55
JFK and and they don’t actually talk about report from Iron Mountain but so many of the people on the panel sort of know something about it that it’s sort of hovering around it and Epstein again
39:03
is the person there who’s saying Look, there’s no harm in fiction. You know, the quiet, he says, The quiet American by Graeme Green in many respects told more truth about the Vietnam War than many
39:12
government press releases. But we have to hang on to the border between fiction and evidence. By the
39:19
way, at that at that meeting at that at that town hall, uh sitting next to Stone or right behind him
39:24
was Jane Rone, who was his research person. And every time he was asked a specific something about
39:30
the specifics in the film, he would defer to her. he really didn’t know this. So, she would sort of
39:36
answer the question and I’ve always been amazed. He really doesn’t know the case that well. He’s relies on other people. Um, well, it was very it’s always very striking to me because I spent a long
39:45
time as a producer at the BBC sometimes doing more of the work on a program, shall we say, than the presenter who then was front and center and took all the credit. So, I rather kind of empathize
39:54
with Jen Moscone. That’s right. So, so you know, Bill Cooper embraces this and this is the part
40:00
of the story which is very important because as I keep on saying, you know, it’s it’s not just
40:06
people believe in their basement believing in a in a silly conspiracy theory, you know, Bigfoot or something and it’s harmless and doesn’t hurt anybody. In fact, sometimes conspiracy theories
40:16
have real life ramifications and do hurt people. Yeah. Exactly. And I think it’s because it’s such
40:23
a p it can be such a powerful explanation of what has gone wrong. What we know from
40:29
political science that one of the main things that makes people more susceptible obviously people’s characters are various and not doesn’t always go the same way. But one of the things that makes
40:38
people more susceptible to conspiracy theory is a shock defeat. Now, often shock defeats happen
40:44
to the left or to the right, but we’ve seen more recently, I would argue, both in America and with Brexit in Britain, that certain people in the very dead political center when experiencing a shock
40:53
defeat will will attribute, you know, the whole thing to the Russians, you know, in a way that, you know, they might not have expected themselves to have done, you know. So, no,
41:01
I think I think that is really important. And when you marry that with somebody like Cooper who is capable with great passion and authority of assert and you know great sort of you know constitutional
41:12
sort of you know density of reference to assert that this is fundamentally a kind of betrayal of
41:18
the republic and to call on you know all which we don’t do here in quite the same way Cromwell’s a bit further back you know call on all the sort of the the spirit of 1776 and the the need for
41:28
ordinary people to take up arms to defend the the country against tyranny. I mean, you know, that’s
41:33
a pretty fiery place to to get to psychologically. You can definitely see that in his reaction to,
41:39
you know, Oklahoma City and and also to Waco. Waco was a huge part of that uh in the early 90s. And,
41:45
you know, what happened at Waco was pretty, you know, pretty suboptimal. But, you know, the the reading of that by people like Cooper, you know, was really, you know, incendurary. Yeah. And so,
41:55
you know, this this book, The Iron Mountain, has just been embraced by so many people. I mean, it’s unbelievable that people are still writing about and accepting Iron Mountain u to support
42:05
their their theories. Yeah. I mean, what one thing I was struck by was relatively speaking,
42:10
it doesn’t seem to play much of a role around the Iraq war. I had a good old dig and I couldn’t see very much. I mean, there may be things that were online at the time that sort of, you know, um
42:19
the websites have died or whatever, but you know, without the evidence, I I can’t assert that that was the case. Um, but you can see it come back and you can see silent weapons come back after
42:29
another series of shocks. You know, you have the combination at the end of the uh the the naughties
42:35
as we have to call them. You have the sort of the slowb burn shock of the Iraq war disaster and the kind of the the deep damage that does to people’s sense of the kind of reliability of the government
42:44
and you know the the kind of goodwill of the of defense companies plus the physical damage to a
42:50
lot of people you know as a result of service. But then you have the crash in 2008 which wrecks
42:57
people’s a lot of people’s lives. it upends their economic life and then you have Obama a black
43:03
president you know and so this is another series of shocks and you see round about that time you know David Newer the journalist who’s done so much work on this you know says the militia movement
43:11
basically doubles in size around 2007208 you get the foundation of the oathkeepers the oathkeepers
43:17
uh not not now but for a long time the oathkeepers sort of chief ideologue as it were was a guy who was a Vietnam vet who would invoke report from Iron Mountain you get uh a guy called Edward
43:27
Griffin who writes a book about um uh the creature from Jackal Island about the Federal Reserve and
43:33
he’s going to meetings with groups on the on the the far right and you know you look at it his book which was in I think if I recall correctly endorsed by Rand Paul and others you know this
43:42
this book has great detail in report from Iron Mountain has one of the funniest mistakes in it uh the whole thing about how he says that um you know uh Iron Mountain is very basically right next
43:53
to Croten on Hudson where the the Hudson Institute is based it’s 80 miles distant you know not
43:58
doesn’t take a long time to check, but because the sort of force of, you know, fictional neatness,
44:03
uh, he he I suppose he says that’s the case. So, yeah, he really starts to revive, as I say,
44:09
after the crash, Obama and and and and did did the people of January 6th also site Iron
44:15
Mountain? I mean, I I can’t give you examples of people citing it on the day, but certainly the Oathkeepers were involved and the Oathkeepers, as I say, have it in the background. The other
44:24
place you can see it or another place you can see it um more through Silent Weapons for Quiet
44:29
Wars is here just here and there in QAnon which obviously had a presence at Jan 6 as well which is
44:37
um which is you know the point where Q says you know in one of the Q drops says the silent war continues and I was watching this morning actually I was watching uh again interview with Austrian TV
44:48
that Jacob Angelie you know the noted guy with the horns and the face paint you know who plays such a
44:53
kind symbolically central role in that. He gave an interview I’m pretty certain it was before Jan 6
44:59
uh where he was talking about his whole grand thesis. He also has a big thesis about why
45:04
Trump is actually a whistleblower against Epstein which is why I was watching it again. But part of
45:10
his whole thesis about you know why the the world state you know the the kind of central banks this
45:16
kind of whole kind of mass of tangled conspiracy he’s got in his head why that’s happening is all to do with underground bunkers. It’s all to do with secret scientific experiments on cloning
45:25
and stuff which is being funded by central banks to enslave the public through debt blah blah blah. And so the idea of the, you know, the the secret underground bunker, which is of course what Iron
45:33
Mountain was in 1967 and why Leonard Leuen used the name because it was so evocative that’s still
45:40
sitting in people’s minds as well. So I wouldn’t be surprised if if that was that was a connection they’d made. Do do you think that maybe maybe Congressman Paulina Luna will have hearings on
45:50
on on trying to find the source of Iron Mountain? Well, I mean, I wouldn’t put it past her. I mean,
45:56
I think her her um it was very striking, wasn’t it, when she was put in charge of the task force
46:01
on the Kennedy uh assassination, the first Kennedy assassination, that that her the equation that
46:08
seemed apparent from what she was saying publicly was, I believe there was more than one shooter. The files are about to come out. erggo, the files will show that there was more than one
46:16
shooter. And again, this sort of the the logic is is internally coherent in its own way, but doesn’t
46:23
make any sense either, you know. So, yeah, I mean, goodness knows, we shall see what she uh what she does next. But, um yeah, I can certainly see it landing uh in those quarters. I mean, it’s just
46:33
I’m just flabbergasted by some of the stuff that she says and clear. She clearly doesn’t doesn’t understand the JFK assassination at all and she just says all these ridiculous things and God help
46:43
us if if there’s more hearings on the JFK. The last two you said of hearings were just were just
46:48
awful. Um look, I’d like to get into this whole idea of truth. I mean at the crux of your book is
46:55
this whole idea of what is true and the the fact that we’ve sort of lost sight. We’re all in these
47:01
we’re all in our own little silos and we all have our own individual truths and and uh we’re losing
47:06
sight of objective truth. Yeah. And I think it brings together a bunch of different things in a
47:12
way that that is rather dispiriting, but I think we have to sort of pay attention to. You know, you have um the whole sort of process in the 1960s and ‘7s of uh in, you know, my degree
47:24
is in English and in in in the English literature schools, but also in other academic disciplines, you know, the advent of of critical theory and what then was called postmodernism. Now,
47:35
there are some real utilities to that way of looking at things. It is a useful way to kind of,
47:40
you know, problematize, defamiliarize things and then and rethink. But the idea that all meaning
47:46
is fundamentally subjective and that any meaning is basically imposed by a sort of dark authority,
47:51
you can see how that could, you know, start to slide into something rather more difficult. Um
47:57
at the same time you know you have the rise of you know political figures like your current president
48:03
but you know certain people in Russia and people in various points across the world you don’t need me to list whose whole way of doing politics functions you know by effectively saying that
48:15
things are true because I’m saying that they’re true. And this this plays into something that I think is often is a useful way to look at conspiracy theory that conspiracy theory is
48:24
kind of an escaped form of fiction. You know, the kind of unity of narrative that you can achieve
48:29
with greater hard work as a fiction writer, you shouldn’t try and achieve as a journalist or a historian or a politician, but that’s sort of what they’re doing. So no there is a there is a kind of
48:38
I mean I think about Trump you know I think Trump it’s almost like somebody was saying to me this morning I was doing an interview and they were saying you know he’s saying that Jay Pal was a you
48:46
know the Fed was a a B a Biden appointee there’s literally footage of Trump appointing him himself but as he’s saying that it’s a Biden appointee it sort of becomes true in his own head I think
48:56
there’s that kind of of of logic about truth and we have to be honest that you know there are other
49:02
people who use phrases like you know my truth if I recall correctly Carl Harris issues that you know
49:07
I think we have to be very very careful. There’s a there’s a book that I mentioned briefly at the end of of my book uh great book by a philosopher called Harry Frankfurt called on [ __ ] where he
49:16
he says we’ve moved from a kind of reverence for correctness and accuracy uh to a reverence for
49:22
sincerity which you know when Trump says these things you know there’s an argument that he is
49:27
being in the moment is being sincere well that doesn’t help us very much we need to get back to a sense that even if it’s really awkward and difficult you know we need to stick to
49:37
the evidence yeah no absolutely I mean, I in my book, I was a teenage JFK conspiracy freak. Um,
49:43
I I bring up uh just as an example of uh uh did Assad use chemical weapons in Syria? and and
49:51
and which he did and and but you have people who immediately well that’s not part of my narrative and and so what’s amazing is all of a sudden websites will pop up you know which no he didn’t
50:02
use chemical weapons and here and citing all sorts of people and and then other people who say that
50:08
point to those websites and and then it becomes part of this well you know you say your thing
50:13
I have my thing and I you know and we’ll have to sort of agree to disagree but the truth the
50:19
truth becomes secondary No, exactly. And I think one of the real kind of moral tests of of a very
50:24
pompous phrase, but let’s go with it. Moral tests of of of journalists and and historians and so on
50:30
is whether they’re prepared to do it about their own most sacred or not quite their own most sacred
50:35
beliefs, their own sides sacred beliefs. There’s a journalist friend of mine here who’s written a book on Qnanon uh called James B um who you know he is the political editor of our only kind of you
50:47
know a newspaper which used to be called the new European it’s now called the new world but it was literally founded as an anti-rexit newspaper he is the political editor thereof but because he’s
50:58
also an investigative journalist he has done uh sterling work unpicking the kind of coagulation of
51:04
disperate theories into a effectively a conspiracy theory around on the idea that the reason that Brexit happened was manipulation by Cambridge Analytica, this kind of, you know, company that
51:13
was scraping Facebook for, you know, data and then doing personality types plus the Russians plus,
51:18
you know, aggregate IQ plus, etc., you know, uh, and and that had been kind of assembled
51:24
by remainers who thought less critically into an explanation of Brexit, which was very consoling.
51:31
Uh James did the the the the work of unpicking it. And he said to me when I interviewed him about it,
51:36
that what people think investigative journalists do is make connections between things. That’s not
51:42
what you do at all. Anyone can make connections between things. Your job is to kick the connections you really want to be true as hard as you possibly can and see which ones really stand
51:51
up. I think if we had more of that, we’d be in a better place. Yeah, absolutely. And that’s why, you know, one of the the researchers I really like most on the JFK assassination is Paul Hul. Paul
52:00
Hook, who’s a conspiracy theorist in the uh in the sick, believed in a conspiracy, but over the years
52:06
he’s had to admit, look, I I follow the evidence, and the evidence is leading me in the direction of no conspiracy. What can I do? You know, it’s just I have to I have to admit it. And that’s,
52:16
you know, and of course now, you know, people really really hate him for for what he’s uh what he’s saying. Yeah. Edward Epstein, another example of that. Yeah. Exactly. Edward, you know,
52:27
Edward J. Epstein realized right up front there’s something wrong with Jim Garrison. You know, it’s really really this is this is horrible. And but other people say, “Well, he’s on our side.
52:36
You know, he that’s what’s most important. He’s one of us, you know, and Exactly. Exactly.” And
52:41
so anyway, so where do we go from here? And how do we fix some of this? Do you have any ideas on what we should do? Because you’ve you’ve your book is important and and and uh there are
52:53
real life ramifications to some of this. Well, I mean, I went to uh a presentation of some polling
53:00
after the US presidential election at the end of last year, which was conducted by an organization
53:06
called PPI um which has roots in the kind of Clinton Democrat period, but it was conducted by
53:12
um two uh British um people I you know conducted by conducted by British pollster effectively. But
53:20
what it was saying um was that when Democrats said during the election and I saw signs of this when
53:27
I was in Pennsylvania in the week before the vote when Democrats said you have to vote Democrat to
53:33
save democracy, right? And meant it sincerely and there was a good case for it and very impassioned
53:39
and all the rest of it but said what voters often heard was you have to vote Democrat to
53:44
save save my job and the status quo. Now I think if you got to the point where that’s the case you
53:52
I mean as was indeed what unfolded you have lost. You have to go back upstream from that. I mean the
53:57
way I think about conspiracy theories is that they’re a kind of red flashing warning like on the light on the dashboard of democracy. They’re they’re an indication that people feel you know
54:07
uh painfully disempowered. I mean some people are obviously in a very particular sort of psychic place and and that’s another matter but in the general swing of things given the amount of belief
54:16
in this stuff people feel very disempowered and it’s not hard to understand why I mean you know you look at people’s sort of flatlining incomes since the financial crash you look at all sorts
54:24
of insecurity particularly in the states around healthcare for example look at the explosion of rage and pain after you know the assassination of the the guy from United Health and and you know
54:34
people said some stuff that was very wrong but but you know the the stories that were coming out stories of of humiliation and disempowerment. Now, that is the sort of stuff that leads to
54:44
conspiracy theory. So, I think what we have to do is go significantly back upstream. I mean, I absolutely believe you have to try and distinguish between fact and fiction, but you can’t just do
54:52
that. You’ve got to make people’s lives better. You got to make people’s lives in good enough,
54:58
you know, cushioned enough, comfortable enough, just that they’re not constantly looking for an
55:04
explanation of why they’ve been wronged. And you know, some of what drives people is is going to be straight up racist. And we can’t we can’t solve that that way. But economically, we can. And I
55:14
think that’s that’s where this points me to. And I I’ve found my view of economic politics becoming
55:20
a little bit more radical as a result of going through this process because I cannot see another solution. Yeah. And I I you know, I have to from my perspective, I’m I’m sort of a I’m actually a
55:30
Canadian conservative. Um, but but I what really bothers me is when I find people who whether
55:37
you’re a conservative or not would will not ever challenge or criticize their own side. So,
55:43
you know, somebody on the conservative side says something ridiculous. Well, you know, I can’t we
55:49
can’t we can’t say anything because he’s one of us. And and I think it’s really really dangerous. We have to have the freedom. Um and and Canada is a really bad example. I mean um our parliamentary
56:01
system, we have very rigid party rules about what you can say in parliament and so backbenches of
56:08
a ruling party, conservative or liberal um will never criticize um their own party. If they do,
56:15
there’s severe ramifications um of what will happen to you. And so you have mouthpieces.
56:21
They just they just they just will say whatever the party tells them to say. And I think it’s
56:27
very very very dangerous and and uh makes me very very upset. No, I can see that. And I
56:33
should say that you know I think some of the most interesting economic radicalism that I have seen in response to this sort of thing has come from small C conservatives both in this country and
56:42
in the US. I will confess my knowledge of Canadian politics is not good enough to comment. Certainly not talking to somebody who’s a scholar and present therein. But, you know, I mean, you know,
56:51
in some ways he’s a very problematic figure. If you think about the whole sort of, you know, fist on January the 6th, Josh Hol, Senator Josh Hol, you know, I I would not side with politically,
57:00
you know, on all of his positions, but it has been very striking to me the um the sort of righteous
57:07
fury that he took into, for instance, his exchange with Mark Zuckerberg or his exchange with
57:14
uh the the then CEO of Boeing. um you know the way that this person who in their organization
57:19
and with their customer base had immense power and Holy saw it as his role to to call that out in in
57:26
remarkably aggressive terms. You’ve seen you know some very creative thinking uh in this country
57:33
from from Tories sometimes actually more creative people on the left because they’ve got a stronger
57:38
sense of having worked in business of what business where business is pushing it a little bit and it is you know disempowering people. So I mean when I say that I’m not taking a particularly
57:46
partisan view. I do absolutely. I mean some creative things. I really appreciate journalism
57:51
and one of my favorite journalists in the UK is uh Nick Cohen. Uh I really really like Nick because
57:58
he’s been very honest here. There’s I’m I’m on the left but there’s some problems um with the left but I’m I’m still on the left and and and uh and so he he becomes interesting because uh
58:09
I can believe what he’s writing. That’s a perfect example. Yes. and a sense of authenticity. Well,
58:15
look, thank you very much for uh for talking with me. I everybody go out and buy this book,
58:21
Ghosts of Iron Mountain. Buy it for yourself, buy one for your friends, or you know, it makes a great
58:26
gift. And this book is very important, deserves to be widely read, widely distributed, and um Phil,
58:33
thank you very much for appearing with us. That’s very kind. Thanks. I’ve really enjoyed it. Okay.

www.mattkprovideo.com/2025/07/31/episode-19-preview/

pre release, unedited version of episode 19, with Chad Zimmerman

mattkprovideo.com/2025/07/28/marina-oswald-describes-the-dark-rifle/

mattkprovideo.com/2025/07/23/marina-oswald-fbi-surveillance-tapes/

Marina Oswald FBI Surveillance Tapes and recordings of her secret service interviews.

Obtained from the US National Archives by esteemed Canadian JFK assassination researcher Denis Morissette.

jfkassassinationfiles.wordpress.com/

Tape recordings of Marina Oswald’s Interviews with the Secret Service…..