On The Trail of Delusion, Episode 17, Michel Gagne

mattkprovideo.com/2025/04/10/on-the-trail-of-delusion-episode-17-michel-gagne/

Welcome to another edition of On the Trail of Delusion
where we try to separate the wheat from the chaff
separate fact from fiction
and try to give you something a little more substantial than the conspiracy nonsense you typically get on YouTube
today my guest is Michel Gagne
who is the author of an amazing book called
Thinking Critically About the Kennedy Assassination: Debunking the Myths and Conspiracy Theories
and here is a copy of his book
i hardily recommend it this should be in every single library well every personal library about the JFK assassination
and of course in libraries around the world
Michel is a teacher he teaches in Montreal at a CJP
which is sort of a a college and teaches a course on conspiracy
he also has a podcast PARANOID PLANET about conspiracy thinking and a variety of topics
and so it’s just want to welcome you to On the Trail of Delusion
well thanks Fred it’s it’s nice to see each other again
i think we’ve done this a few times but it’s the first time on your podcast
So let’s let’s start off and tell me a bit about how you got interested in the JFK assassination
uh well like many of us I mean I’m Gen X i was born in 72 so I’m in my early 50s
uh I was in university when the Oliver Stone film came out
i took my mother to see it for Mother’s Day back in what was it 90 I guess
it was Mother’s Day 1992
it was still kind of lingering in some of the smaller movie houses back then
and I I I don’t I didn’t become a conspiracist overnight
but it kind of just sat with me and became part of the the zeitgeist

you know like I I remember Guns and Roses had some lyrics about you know uh who was there when we shot Kennedy and the and also the the Rolling Stones had
a lot of the music I was listening to stuff on the Simpsons you know who killed Mr burns
of these things kind of fed reminded me about this whole enigma about the man on the grassy knoll
and I think I was on a trip to Europe with a choir back in ’95
i took a year off studies and it was just this ongoing joke about the man on the grassy null
and I think by the time I came back went back to university and kind of and the internet was around right the internet emerged somewhere around between ’92 and 95
so now there’s access to these other things and I remember trying to read the transcript of the uh the garrison trial of Klay Shaw
particularly the deposition or the the um what do you call it the Yeah is it do you call it a deposition in court
the testimony
yeah yeah
and I remember being left in my hunger
though it didn’t make me think less that there was a conspiracy theory
because at the same time I started following Fletcher Prouty
(o3:35:17)
There’s a man he was a young man at that time called Len Osanic
who before we had podcasts had this internet radio program
called Black Op Radio
so I guess from Oliver Stone I kind of discovered Mr X
(0:03:45:15)
Mr Colonel Prouty through Len Osanic’s website
I went to visit Len Osanic when I took some high school students on an exchange trip to Vancouver
And so I remember sitting in his studio when he was interviewing somebody about
I think it was flight 800
it had nothing to do with the Kennedy
but we’d certainly talked a lot about Oliver Stone and Kennedy
after that so I guess around that time this was the early 2000s
I was hooked i was into it i was even telling my high school students:
“Oh you know this conspiracy theory has got to be real.”
and I would even lecture about it at lunchtime
you know showing the the impossibility of the magic bullet
so I think all of those things made me obsessive over Kennedy
(0:04:33:23)
and I mean there were personal issues as well
I think emotional issues that made me want to believe
that someone was out to get me and
it took it was only about 2011 after I started teaching in a in a college
so a seup is a a junior college

which is kind of I would say it’s a bridge between high school and university
that doesn’t exist in the United States or in the rest of Canada
but it’s like a grade 12 freshman year combined

and that’s when I actually started teaching critical thinking and
I wanted to teach a course on conspiracy theories

I didn’t believe in most conspiracy theories
(0:05:18:04)

i had a very quick kind of slow interest in
9/11 conspiracy theories

but eventually I realized
no it wasn’t a missile that hit the Pentagon
0:05:11:18

and I think from that I started kind of
reverse engineering my own beliefs about Kennedy
until I took out the Warren Report from our college library
0:05:20:23
back in 2011 or so
and I looked all over for that zigzagging bullet
and I didn’t find it
and that’s when I lost my faith in Oliver Stone
0:05:26:01
that was the time that was the point in my life when I said
why did he have to lie about that to try to get me to believe in a conspiracy
so there’s a long answer for you
but between Oliver Stone’s film in ’91
and my reading of the Warren report in 2011
so that’s a 20-year period I was in the rabbit hole
and I eventually clawed my way out
many people don’t but I managed to I think
yeah I’m really happy you did as as did I and some other people
how long did did that journey take you to really climb out
I I remember around 2002 or
I was reading a book on 9/11 conspiracy theories
my brother came into the room he goes
“It was a plane.”
I’m like “Oh come on.”

You know and and then eventually he sent
I don’t know if it was he or someone else sent me a website
and it was one of these debunking websites about 911
and I think because I wasn’t as invested in 911
it was easy for me to kind of take a step back and go
“Well what if I am wrong about this uh it took a lot longer for me to be willing to reconsider the whole Kennedy thing
so it started kind of with realizing that 9/11 wasn’t an inside job
it was it was an inside job in the sense that there were 19 you know hijackers a
nd maybe maybe the FBI CIA kind of let it happen
or at least were I think it was just you know
really neglectful investigations

but it explained to me how these things can happen without a grand conspiracy and uh and I think from there I kind of eventually realized there’s more there’s more information uh I I went to grad school of course in the early 2000s and I think having to do your own archival research and I know you do that a lot of that now that goes a long way to make you understand all the minutiae of history that
7:22
and ironically I think it’s um it was Tink Thompson the famous JFK conspiracy theorist who was in it a short documentary by Errol Morris it’s called the Umbrella Man and Ting Thompson although I disagree with almost everything he says I wrote a very scathing review of Last Second in Dallas but he was right in this one thing is that when it came to the umbrella man so many people jump to conclusions without understanding that there’s a whole other story there that makes no sense to anybody except Louis Steven Whit the man with the umbrella and the reason he was there was not to shoot at Kennedy was to protest you know um uh the way that Joe Kennedy senior had encouraged the uh the British premier prime minister to uh uh what’s the word um to go easy on Hitler to appease Hitler that’s right so this idea that history it’s kind of like quantum mechanics and Hollywood movies have this economy of character characters everything has to fall in line there has to be kind of one single narrative thread history doesn’t work like that so I think going to grad school doing a lot of um archival research in my case it was on the Northern Ireland troubles I realized that the story we hear even sometimes we read in academic textbooks is a streamlined story that gives no room for chaos and chance and that’s really what I think happened with Kennedy is I realized there’s a lot more chaos and chance happening than people give it uh do and and that’s a big reason that made me kind of step back so I was not brainwashed by the CIA i was not uh compelled or or uh threatened in any way uh I just I just realized that I was I was listening to a very simplistic story that turned out to be manipulative and wrong it’s kind of funny when when when people sometimes people ask me if I believe in any conspiracies and when I tell them that yeah al-Qaeda conspired to bring down the World Trade Center then they look at me they don’t like that conspiracy yeah that that one doesn’t quite fit when when when you when you finally sort of changed your mind on the Kennedy assassination how did how did you feel i mean I mean for me it was a it was like a feeling of of relief i don’t know it was a feeling of oh my god it all makes sense now it’s like I I just felt this calmness overtake me how did you feel uh I felt the same way but not immediately i think at first I felt stupid and I think this is one of the reasons I got into conspiracy theories in the first place is growing up you know I was bullied uh like a lot of kids my generation parents divorced but uh there was no supervision left alone a lot and um you know and so there was a lot of opportunities there for me to either feel neglected or taken advantage of by you know older siblings kids in the street things like that and I think there was a certain sense of anxiety about safety about the world being an unpredictable place and conspiracy theories do give you a kind of a false sense of security you know who to blame you could point your finger i wrote a whole concluding chapter in my book about scapegoating so I think in that sense the conspiracy theories had given me a way of understanding history it wasn’t accurate but at least it fit with how I understood the world um so at first you know how sometimes when you feel embarrassed you say something stupid at a party or whatever your ears get warm and you start wondering like okay did any everybody see me you feel like you’re walking around naked in front of a crowd i think initially I kind of felt like that which is why I was reluctant to pick up the Warren report just in case it had something but by 2011 what was upsetting me more is whenever I taught about the Kennedy assassination in my conspiracies class and usually I focused on UFOs and other things but whenever I did I realized how excited I was getting as if I have to defend this almost like it’s a point of faith and uh I grew up in the Christian faith you grew up in the Jewish faith you know sometimes we feel as though we don’t understand something but it has to be true otherwise everything else falls apart right we can maybe hold on to some principle and over time I’ve had enough enough brushes with doubt in my faith that I realized that it’s not the end of the world to be wrong about something because the truth is the truth and it might actually make you more grounded in the things that are true and make you able to look past the things that are not and I think it was the same thing so because I was feeling this anxiety teaching about Kennedy
(11:38)
because I thought I knew the story
but I realized I never read Posner,i never read the Warren Commission report
i never read the HSCA report and by that time around 2008 Vincent Bugliosi’s book came out
it was just getting trashed by the conspiracist media that I was reading and I thought wow
that must be a horrible book uh
but it was so big and so expensive I didn’t want to actually read it myself
so eventually I think I had to I had to overcome that
look if I need to prove that my position is right I need to be able to understand my my enemy’s position is
the more I read my enemy’s position you know I did read Posner I did read some
I don’t think I’ve read all of Bugliosi has anybody I mean it’s just it’s just huge
I mean there’s like 900 pages of footnotes on a CD ROM how do you get through that
but I did read big chunks of it and eventually I thought
story makes so much more sense it’s simple It’s it’s easy to grasp
it doesn’t ask me to imagine human beings as they are in movies you know
they’re not Darth Vader they’re not Sauron
like me they desire things they hate things they fear things and in the end sometimes they act rashly
and all of that fit Lee Oswald
so I was listen to I was listening to one of your previous podcasts where you were talking about um that biography of Lee Oswald and and I forget the name of your guest there um that of
Scott Mosley
that’s right and uh and I remember he brought up this you know that once you look into Oswald’s life you realize there’s no need for the CIA to explain who this guy is
from a young age particularly if you’ve grown up like I did in a broken home from a young age these anxieties mount up and you can either become the resilient survivor or you become the victim who perpetually blames other people and at some point lashes out somehow and maybe this is a good time for me to say this but we might talk about Oliver Stone later on i have a lot of I don’t know if it’s empathy i I have some sympathy for Oliver Stone because as a Vietnam veteran he’s what Jonathan Kay calls a a damaged survivor right he’s looking for some reason that could say my friends didn’t die for nothing right he saw people’s heads blow off and you know he got into drugs he you know it was a horrible experience i completely sympathize with how angry he must feel about the Vietnam War but it doesn’t mean you make up stuff right it doesn’t mean that you somehow falsify history in order to justify your position and so he was at it again a couple weeks ago which is sad uh I’m more upset at the other people like Dugeno and uh and so on who I don’t think have a reason to have that veil over their eyes they just they’re just really bad critical thinkers um so I I forgot what your question was there but once you get to know Lee Oswald’s personal life yeah from there you can kind of understand how the other people are acting you know everybody is and I I pardon the expression but I sometimes say things to my this to my students you know the CIA what they ultimately do is you know f around and cover their asses you know uh it’s only after that they can rationalize that it was all for national security but in the moment of kind of anticipation of danger you do a lot of stupid things and then you realize you went too far and I think when we look around what was happening in Mexico City uh the way that the FBI was scrging around trying to find Oswald but not really find O look for Oswald you know there’s a lot of incompetence and a lot of shortness of time and we all cut corners and and unfortunately security agencies do that as well you know a lot of these security agents for for Kennedy were drinking the night before that is preposterous but it’s humanity so at some point we have to look all of this and I use I used this word uh I think it was the Cohen brothers who used in the movie it’s a it’s a cluster [  ] you know it’s one of these events that makes no sense until you realize that there’s bungling on a whole bunch of different sides including Oswald who’s trying to figure out until the last minute what to do and how to do it and how to run away right i don’t think you even thought about that until the third shot rang up um so anyway so I I’ll stop there because I think I’ve rambled i I think you’re raising a really good point about the fact look you know we’re talking about human beings here and so human beings you know make mistakes they do all sorts of things that maybe we can’t personally understand um I I mean you just find the conspiracy theorists who just don’t seem to accept that there might be an error in a document that the CIA sometimes makes a mistake or misfiles something or or or you know we even have people analyzing the routing slips for the CI documents and trying to oh my god this doesn’t make sense but you know would it would it make sense i mean it’s you know I worked I I worked at Intel for 9 years and if you looked at the emails I received from various people I mean why am I copied on this email i don’t I’m not interested but I’m copied doesn’t make any sense so that human factor is just missing from conspiracy books yeah two things the hobos right the uh the three men who were found the tramps who were found in this railway car actually like a half mile from Dy Plaza turns out they weren’t really all that close uh their booking slips were misplaced for was it 20 25 years 30 years and it was a conspiracist author who found them so eventually we found out oh so it wasn’t you know eh Howard Hunt after all uh the other thing is yeah I got copied on a list of Freemasons you know back in the 90s when I was really into these conspiracy theories I I had a colleague whose friend who family friend was in the Freemasons and kind of looking for all these Masonic secrets in Nova Scotia with Lee lines and basically rock formations that they thought were like ancient druidic temples or or you know things from the uh the Nice Templar i don’t know what it was but I kind of got into that he sent me some emails and eventually I started receiving emails from these Freemasons talking to each other and I’m like “Uh guys I’m not sure I’m meant to be here you know because I didn’t want to get in trouble.” So eventually they took me off their list so I can understand how a journalist will get uh you know information about bombing Yemen uh by accident when people are just not paying attention yeah and you know I mean it’s when I was back in conspiracy land I used to I used to feel a special bond with my conspiracy books you know there was like all this like sort of special knowledge that you know that I had access to and and and I could tell people about they weren’t that interested but I knew and it was like all this special stuff and then you change your mind you realize oh my god what’s in those books is pretty is a lot of nonsense yeah i remember reading I I see it over there across the room there this big fat book by um Mike Roupert called Crossing the Rubicon and Rupert was this uh Californiabased exapd guy who was really obsessed with the concept of peak oil and I remember reading that when I was starting my college career wondering how much of this is real or not but I wanted to believe Mike Rubert cuz he was an LAPD guy he seemed to know what was going on and he had this whole kind of secret personal life about um I guess the CIA trying to tap his phones or or bug his computers whatever it was and it turns out a lot of it was just this paranoia and a few years later you know I found out he shot himself and he was kind of ruined he he was running away to Venezuela he came to Toronto I actually met um one this uh what’s his name he’s a English professor for California but he’s Canadian he used to work in the foreign service area (19:27) peter Dale Scott that’s right i met Peter Dale Scott at McGill University really yeah around 2007 or so and again he was also talking about peak oil and 9/11 and Kennedy and I went to see the Peter Dale Scott to ask him about my grouper he’s like “Well I don’t know you so I don’t know how much I should tell you.” Right there was this cloak and dagger feeling um so what happens is when when you’re trusted in the group you get the stuff you feel initiated but there’s always going to be a a a smaller circle of initiates that you can’t enter it becomes really cultlike um I I never was in a cult per se but having grown up in the evangelical culture there are cultish elements sometimes and there are certain groups that I’ve been to certain churches that I was like okay I’m not sticking around here because this is a step away from the Kool-Aid um so I think having had like that that nearness to extreme fundamentalism made me a little bit more wary of that you know my father was very religious but my father was also very wary of extreme fundamentalism and so I think when I started realizing that my conspiracy quest was leading me in something like that but because it wasn’t religious it didn’t I didn’t realize what it was until later on when I was isolating myself from others very fearful having this very us and them you know um way of thinking and ultimately what’s interesting is I was never on the brunt end of discipline when I was a conspiracist but when I did write my book well then now the the very hateful comment started appearing some on Amazon uh D Eugeno and what’s his name the doctor the uh the oncologist (21:09) dr mantic Dr mantic yes yeah they both wrote some nasty things i also found out that David Mantic phoned Michael Shurmer who who who endorsed the back of my book and really tried to box in Shurmer to prove that Shurmer was incompetent didn’t know anything about the Kennedy assassination of course that’s not why I had Shurmer endorse my book it’s because Shurmer writes about critical thinking all the time i had John McAdams endorse my book because he knew about the Kennedy assassination so it was interesting how the discipline started coming in when they realized that not just that you’re saying bad things about them but you’re also saying I used to be one of them i think there’s more dislike for ex-members because we are apos we’re apostates right we’re not just crit critics who don’t get it we are people who got it and then decided that actually that was wrong very very true i totally agree so tell me a bit about um you know writing of this book or you know why you decided to write it the process of of writing it and the publishing it it’s it’s it’s a terrific book i mean I actually don’t keep this on my bookcase i keep this on my desk as a handy reference because I think it’s such an important book oh thanks Fred that’s that’s very nice of you because at first I was thinking does the world need another Kennedy book i know there’s what something like 30,000 publications on Kennedy so this is just another drop but what I did notice was that there was uh there was a lack of books that were not just skeptical but were looking at the arguments of conspiracists uh Pausner Bouiosi etc are excellent for identifying many of the factual mistakes but they’re lawyers right they’re people who are used to cross-examining witnesses (22:49) and I think they do good jobs in what they do McAdams did write a book called Assassination was it JFK assassination logic yep but it’s not really logic he’s a political scientist it’s more kind of practical wisdom if you wish or identifying um you know vague language and misunderstandings my advantage is that I was although I’m a historian by training I was teaching philosophy in a humanities department one of the courses that we all have to teach in my department whether or not you have a philosophy background is critical thinking and basic the basics of inductive deductive logic uh identifying fallacies these sorts of things and so that that led me to say hey this is not my expertise I better study more about that so I studied a lot of logical theory uh which of course for 17 18 year olds you can only kind of scratch the surface but it taught me to be much more disciplined the way that I study so in a sense what I wanted to do with this book is my problem as an historian even though I had a master’s degree by this point but I could still miss the uh I could still be mis uh misunderstand an argument because I was only looking at the facts and if you line up a bunch of true facts you can still end up with a false conclusion because there’s nothing linking those facts to that conclusion right there’s a there’s a there’s an assumption that these things prove the other but they don’t and I realized that that was a big problem with conspiracy theories it’s not so much that they have bad facts you could they might actually be quite right in fact as you know you argue with a conspiracy theorist and they will they will know the minutia of statistics so much more than any skeptic because they’re absolutely obsessed with it you know um Alex Jones is a great example right he can talk you under the table with statistics but only because he uses them to try to prove something he already believes is true he doesn’t understand anything about inductive or uh deductive logic so I thought that I would expose that the the problems in reasoning so I didn’t want to read every single possible conspiracy book out there i decided I’m going to take a cross-section certainly Garrison is one of them oliver Stone’s one of them uh there was there’s some stuff about Robert Groden in there Fletcher Prrowy Mark Lane and a few others no David Lifton uh James Fetzer David Mantic so I took some of their main writings and I tried to organize a number of chapters by theme i looked at a number of the people that were accused of killing Kennedy the CIA the FBI um the uh the military-industrial complex whatever that means right it’s a pretty large category um and Lynden Johnson uh as well as the Oswald so I kind of start with a section or it’s actually the second section of the book the first section looks at myths about Kennedy the second section looks at you know I think I called it who wants to be an assassin you know how all the different people who have been said to be uh suspicious and in the end yeah everybody’s suspicious who doesn’t like Kennedy but that doesn’t mean they killed him and then ultimately when you actually look at the um the nuts and bolts when you look at the forensics and that’s what the the second the sorry the third and fourth part of the book are it’s looking at the gunshots looking at the bullets looking at the uh the autopsy um evidence whatever is available i could not get into NAR i did ask but uh you know there’s only so many people can get in but what’s wonderful is that some television and print media have gotten professional doctors to look at this stuff (26:24) you know there’s this great show called Cold Case JFK that came out while I was already starting to write this book and this was a mint for kind of getting my head wrapped around well how could a single person do all that shooting and it gets interpreted as multiple shooters um and then of course trying to kind of unpack the the Zapruder film and these kinds of things so the I would say the latter half of the book deals more with forensic issues um you know weapons and bullets and pictures and the first half deals more with the issues of the story of Kennedy the story of Kennedy’s so-called enemies and how these stories get written according to certain agenda historians do this all the time if they’re responsible they’ll say “I realize that I left this out i left that out left that out but what I really want to focus on was say uh Kennedy’s love interests or Kennedy’s foreign policy but when you start with the conclusion without actually investigating all of the different possible opinions out there and conspiracy theorists are very good for cherrypicking only certain viewpoints then you end up constructing a story that’s a myth and by myth I don’t necessarily mean like um a story that is always an all completely false it’s a story that starts with um looking for meaning or purpose rather than looking for truth and if your purpose is to try to be vindicated for your anger about the Vietnam War then you’re going to cherrypick only those things that will vindicate your feeling of being outraged rather than understanding that a lot of stuff happened about Vietnam and it’s not your fault you suffered you hated it but that doesn’t mean that the man you liked was murdered because of it yeah i think Oliver Stone makes that horrible uh uh assumption or or or the way he approaches the the evidence is to say “Oh I want to I’m going to answer the question of why before I answer the question of how it was done.” And so he he answers that question he knows the why and then that forces him into a conclusion about how it was done and and and so it’s just a forced it’s just a wrong way to look at things very much so very much so uh when you start with a why you start ignoring the fact about why not or why this way and not another way it it makes it forc you to write history teologically you know you start with an idea of where everything is going to go so either it’s going to go to the military-industrial complex controlling the world or it should have gone to a fabulous workers utopia world peace and everything that you thought Kennedy was going to achieve and both of those uh both of those possibilities are wrong right the history kind of just takes on it’s chaotic you know I think that’s what I say in the in the opening uh in the pro the the preface of the book is when I realize that number one history is absolutely chaotic there’s too much chance to be able to say that this particular group was able to achieve exactly what they wanted and not get found out for it for example and at the same time human nature is very predictable and so AAM’s razor can allow you to say look is it likely that a guy like Oswald after all these years was faking being a communist since he was 15 years old or is it more likely that he actually believed in it and when you actually read his readings and I one of the great books uh was Norman Mailers’s Oswald’s Tale (30.00.00) right here’s a man who believed in a conspiracy who hired Russian interpreters to help him go to the so uh the former Soviet Union in the mid ’90s and tried to find the smoking gun and in the end what he found was a scared little child who thought that the world needed him but no one realized how great he was right there’s this narcissistic manchild who comes back to the United States so um so obsessed with his own uh his own self-standing his own uh self-importance uh that he beats his wife he doesn’t keep a job he tries to shoot uh a a retired general a racist i don’t think anybody should love um General uh what was his name walker general Walker but at the same time you know it shows it shows Oswald’s uh MMO from very early on uh and so you know shooting Kennedy was just one more thing to do on this on this line to proving to the world that he was a great person yeah you talked a bit about um how people line up their facts it’s kind of interesting with the new documents you have Jefferson Morley who looks at the new documents and says “Oh I have found a fact pattern.” First time I thought “A fact pattern and this fact pattern leads me to believe that counter intelligence was you know responsible for the assassination (31:2) and you look at the fact pattern and it’s like it’s it’s every part of it is all questionable yep you know and it and but he’s convinced you know because the pattern fits the theory in his mind and the pattern does not allow for other patterns to also exist simultaneously as as kind of a comparison right um yeah Mley was on my podcast i’m I’m always thankful when a conspiracy believer comes on my podcast (31:54) i’ve had very few Lenosic Jefferson Moley Nick Pope you know when they come on I want to give them a fair hearing but at the same time I always find myself having to push back a little bit because they they they they jump they they do this gish gallop you know these assumptions that well we know this is true so therefore this is also true and this is also true and at some point I say well hold on a second right you’re you’re are are you not making assumptions here so I’m thankful he came on but at the same time and I’m I’m getting this from Max Holland Max Holland’s word words here um Jeff Morley is dangerous because he’s a smart guy because he should realize that his theory is full of holes but he presents it as though it’s a given and he’s also smart enough to know where to stop he knows that he says enemies inside the Kennedy administration caused his death he doesn’t say the CIA murdered him right he’s leaving it open that if somebody says Cuba did it okay Cuba did it but the CIA just kind of stepped aside it’s not illegal they could just say we didn’t know what was going on or we didn’t catch on so Morely uh thrives in ambiguity and that’s where he finds strength but unfortunately um it’s kind of an empty shell yeah i think he also u finds strength in that in that a lot of people won’t check the primary documents that he cites so he’s citing all these primary documents hoping or or and and few people will actually go to them and actually read them for themselves and that’s where a lot of his stuff falls apart i mean he’s always I mean before the redactions in fact I’m doing a blog post right now about you know Morley was pointing to a certain CIA document about material coming out of out of the CIA in Mexico City about Cuba and oh this is going to there’s a lot of redactions this is going to tell us a lot about Oswald well then the redactions come out and it tells you nothing about Oswald and and you just see that sort of pattern over and over again yeah uh Mark Lane was also great for that um you you follow Just Stanton Freriedman was great for that holding up pages that were redacted and and assuming that under the dark print there’s going to be some great revelation um yeah it’s unfortunate i I have not spent a lot of time factchecking morally as much i mean when I was writing my book he didn’t stand out to me as one of the worst ones out there so I gave him a little bit of coverage here and there but I I found that um Fletcher Prrowy was so bad at doing this because he spent something like 20 25 years talking about classified documents that he allegedly had copies in his home but couldn’t share and when these documents are finally released particularly in the ’90s under the ARB you’re like that’s not at all what he’s trying to say right kennedy removing a thousand troops is not removing all troops it’s really just moving things around to send a message to DM who ends up getting assassinated by his generals so I found that um uh Fletcher Prrowy was constantly taking advantage of his status his his his title as a retired Air Force colonel as if he’s the inside man and he knows what’s going on did you talk about Did you talk about Fletcher Prrowy with Lenosic i did in fact I had him on uh long before I did my Kennedy series i did a series a short series on deep state and I had three people there i had Lenos Sanic talk about Fletcher Prrowy’s concept of the deep state you know the secret team running the world through the banks um I I think I may have had a long conversation with my co-host after that cuz I felt there’s so many things that need to be uh adjusted and explained and one of them is that Fletcher Prrowy I don’t think was himself an anti-semite but when you read him closely it’s essentially the protocols of the elders of Zion Americanstyle you know uh 20 for for the 21st century in fact he often would quote the report from Iron Mountain which was a satire but he used it as though it was a veritical report Allah you know protocols of the elders of Zion so there’s a lot of problems there with prrowy and then what happened is I had a former congressional aid called Mike Lofrren come on and he wrote a book about the deep state but of course Lofrren is talking about the revolving door between Congress and lobbyists right so that’s a very different kind of deep state it’s not Jews running the banks it’s just politicians who are in the pocket of you know weapons developers and then I also had um Kathine Olstead uh American professor at University of California uh not Berkeley the one up north in Sacramento uh near there anyways uh so uh she came in and and we looked at what she understood to be the deep state which is largely the IRS and income tax uh no she she doesn’t believe in a deep state she was saying this is where the idea came from after World War I this massive bureaucracy for admin administering taxation uh became kind of this secret opaque group that people were wondering what’s going on there it’s no longer our elected members to Congress it’s rather some kind of invisible bureaucracy that really runs our lives so I looked at these different concepts of deep state i felt that Leno Sanic’s version was the one that left me most wanting uh but yeah so I did did chat with Len what’s interesting about Len and I don’t think you’ve been listening to this and I don’t think he listens to my podcast he did contact me a few weeks later and he told me “Uh I don’t want to receive your updates your email updates anymore because your show is too paranoid.” I thought that was interesting i call it paranoid planet because I think all of us have a tendency to be paranoid uh what Lens suggests is that other people are paranoid but he’s he’s right um and if you can’t have a sense of humor about yourself if you’re not unable to say “I’m willing to be wrong on this,” then that’s when you’re most in danger of conspiratorial conspiracist logic yeah one thing about Fletcher Prrowy is that you know he did attend uh a conference for the Institute of Historical Revisionism which was a Holocaust denying outfit he attended one of their conferences and I actually put on my blog he wrote a letter to their journal um congratulating them on what a great magazine they were publishing um which is like bizarre you know you must know that this journal is dedicated to denying the Holocaust um and yet he loved the magazine because he got attention from them you know it was the same thing with Scientology he was an apologist for Scientologist but I don’t think he ever screamed at ashtrays or you know went to a Tom Cruz uh movie or whatever like I I don’t think that he was interested in Scientology’s teachings but he found a kindred spirit because they also thought like him that the world is being run by some kind of secret government and in many ways Fletcher Prrowy I think fits the description of the aging crank as as um uh Jonathan Kay describes in his book on 911 you know the crank is not is not a mentally ill person it’s not even a person of ill will it’s a person who’s kind of the the the hamster wheel is turning but they’re retired there’s not much for them to do so conspiracies becomes this kind of great puzzle and they start getting very imaginative with this puzzle you know Fletcher Prrowy never protested I think one day in the street about the Kennedy assassination but he was willing to say anything to anybody who came to his house namely Leno Sanic who filmed you know hundreds of hours or whatever of of interviews with him you know I mean many years ago I I was working on a political campaign here in Ottawa and so I went to a lot of events and you know you start going to a lot of events and like almost at every event you’d have somebody who would come up to you with like a big file some sort of big file of paper and they want to talk to you about it could be fluoride in the water or it could be it could be something or you know it could be a a building or something in Ottawa that’s taken over by the federal government or something but they have this massive file they’ve accumulated over the years and they have to talk to you about the something that’s really important that only they know about and you and those are the cranks you get them almost at every political meeting you go to yeah yeah um you know I was one of them i was one of them and what happens is I think you know I forget which philosopher said you know every human has kind of a god-shaped hole i think we all have a Satan shaped hole we all need to have some kind of a devil figure uh that can explain the why there’s evil in the world why there’s suffering and it helps to believe that some very powerful and and very secretive person or group is behind a lot of the chaos in our lives uh no religions try to explain that but what happens in a secular age when people don’t really have any kind of overarching system to explain why these things happen they end up creating new ones and I think that uh the you know I mentioned the Freemasons earlier uh the military-industrial complex the deep state these are all equivalences of some form of demonic uh world that helps us explain why we suffer why and I think it’s time for us to go back to the real villain it’s the the Jews i mean why invent something new we we we already know yeah i I don’t know if I said this with you because I know you’re Jewish but on my podcast every now somebody somebody will say “You know what the problem is?” I’m like “Please don’t say the Jews please don’t say the Jews.” Uh yeah yeah one of my best friends whenever whenever he calls me during the day and we talk about some problem he says “You know whose fault this is?” I said “Yes it’s the Jews.” Yeah yeah was he going to say that so Len you know I mean I have to laugh at Len Oanic i mean Black Op you listen to Black Opt you know this is the radio show the NSA does not want you to listen to yeah yeah yeah the NSA couldn’t give couldn’t give a [  ] about this show they don’t even know what’s in existence yeah i I I did ask him about that and he says it was tongue and cheek i think he does have a sense of humor um but you know Len has become a a kind of a he was I don’t know maybe not today but in the ‘9s he was a bit of an underground superstar i mean he’s the guy who got all these people on the record when no one on TV would talk to them you know Stone Mley and D Eugeno are in front of Congress now back then the only press they were getting was Black Op and he was having all those people on so in many ways it was a one-stop shop for conspiracy research right that’s what he calls it um but I think Len has a deep need uh to you know explain why the world is so and he found it in this kind of father figure Fletcher Prrowy and I I said this on my podcast it’s a little bit like that relationship in that Mel Gibson movie Man Without a Face no you you you’re the young man who befriends this aging man who is kind of ostracized by society and there’s some good in him but you don’t want to hear the story where he was a pedophile or that he uh hates the Jews or whatever right that’s just beyond the pale you think there’s enough in him to redeem you and so you follow his crazy stories ignoring the things that other people are trying to use to discredit him that’s why in my book I kind of started the section I talked about prrowy i said “Look Proud’s been accused of a number of things i want to focus on his arguments it’s it would be easy for me to say he hangs out with anti-semites but the the thing is he says Kennedy was going to pull out of Vietnam let’s deal with that let’s look at if NSAM263 or whatever it was really says I’m going to pull all the troops out of Vietnam.” And it doesn’t right and there’s enough background there and I looked at other historians um uh Mark Silverstone most more recently he’s just recently written a book called I think the the Kennedy withdrawal um and there’s also this great Stanley Carau has big fat book on Vietnam that I started reading way back in Seap then my high school teacher gave me a copy um when I was in university and I think I finished reading it while I was writing my book so it took about 20 minute 20 years for me to write read that whole book but once you kind of get the whole the whole context of Vietnam you realize that people like Fletcher Prrowy are really just creating a a fairy tale yeah i I I I uh talked to Mark Silverstone in Dallas he was there uh lecturing at the Sixth Floor Museum last um last November so it was nice to to meet him and his book is really really terrific there is sort of a Kennedy cult out there that sort of sees Kennedy as this this incredible peacemaker who is going to usher in a a whole new era of peace and dant peace with with the Soviet Union peace with Cuba he was going to end poverty he was going to you know fix race relations he was going he was do going to do everything and that’s why he had to be killed yeah um in in the first part of my book I talk about these three myths about Kennedy and the first one is one that kind of died with him and that’s what we might call the myth of the Irish mafia uh a lot of um journalists who were very anti- Kennedy at that time uh you know right-leaning journalists who knew about the affairs uh who thought that he was a reckless youth right in fact there was a book called JFK reckless youth um you know they kind of saw through the Kennedys as you know a good-looking corrupt um dynasty then there was the myth of Camelot which many of us still abide by today right this idea that he wanted civil rights he was going to change the world he was a progressive all these things turns out you know the the other president who was most like Kennedy was Ronald Reagan you know Kennedy wanted massive tax cuts uh Kennedy was a hawk and now he was against nuclear weapons but so was Reagan you know he was a hawk against communism and even though as and I think Silverstone’s interesting because he says Kendi until his death was of two minds about Vietnam we don’t want to put all of our what is it all of our ducks in that basket no that’s a mixed metaphor um we don’t want to put all of our whatever it is all all of our stuff in that one thing uh he was much more obsessed with Cuba right and and Berlin uh but Kennedy was a hawk in in in financial relations so the the m and civil rights yeah he was in favor of civil rights but he didn’t know a lot of black people uh he didn’t spend a lot of time you know on the campaign trail looking for uh you know places to support civil rights he was much more interested in international affairs international relations it’s only once the Klux Clan started bombing churches in Birmingham that he felt okay he has to take a stand now right before that it was kind of like let’s let’s do the diplomatic kind of uh you know behind the scenes thing um and and so this myth of Camelot is kind of misleading but it’s made us think of Kennedy as larger than life and then there’s this third myth that the conspiracies do they take they take Camelot and then I guess it’s like Camelot on crack they I call it the prince of peace myth uh he becomes not King Arthur he becomes Jesus Christ he becomes the crucified Messiah who unfortunately never rose from the dead right christians have a hope that he their messiah is coming back but the Oliver Stones Messiah is buried in the ground and he’s not coming back so we you know we we the conspiracy believers are the ones who have to change the world right it’s a it’s a very dark and depressing hopeless form of messianism and and it’s also not just changed the world but the but until we uncover the facts of the JFK assassination we cannot have a better world yes that’s right a better world is predicated on on uncovering the the malicious forces at play here yeah but that’s not entirely their fault i I think and as much as I don’t want to blame the victim here but Mrs kennedy really fed this whole idea that she even said it there will never be another Camelot what happened from 1961 to 1963 was essentially an aberration a good aberration of American history and we can never get that back which is unfortunate because you’ve had people I think uh Obama might be one um at the time I I’m always been a little bit more rightle leaning i thought John McCain would have made a fine president in 2000 certainly better than George W bush so I think there are a lot of people who might have had that you know maybe not the same thing as Kennedy but that kind of idea that the charismatic man can also be the servant of the people can also usher in an era of of change of positive change i thought Jimmy Carter lacked the charisma for that but he was a good man right so there are other people who could have taken on that Kennedy mantle but Mrs kennedy and other Kennedy supporters will not allow that to happen we have to keep living in 1963 and and we can never we can never let that moment go we can never move on uh from that moment a very good book to read is have you read Gary Wills’s book The Kennedy Imprisonment no I think I heard the name but I haven’t excellent it’s it’s Gary Wils is a Catholic theo the theologian and he wrote a really good book about the Kennedy family and and and uh you know some of the beliefs particularly about women that that John Kennedy got from his father about the multiple affairs I mean his father did that as well Robert Kennedy didn’t um but the imprisonment particularly of Edward Kennedy who basically wanted to have the type of affairs that his brother had but it was age of feminism where it was really frowned upon to sort of be that kind of macho guy who was always having an affair and sort of he was always getting caught and didn’t know how to behave but it’s it’s a very very interesting book i’m I’m just struck by you know again this this whole thing about you know this this this myth about Kennedy i mean I find it funny that had the CIA or the FBI really wanted to get rid of Kennedy that they could have easily just told the press about his affair with Sam Gian Kana’s girlfriend or Alan Romesh right the um which did endanger national security and at that time would have sunk his candidacy and would have been a very easy and quick way of to really sink him yeah yeah that was uh what was her name um ex Judith Xner exner uh but there was also Alan Romesh right who was an East German spy at least she was connected to the Stazzi yeah and of course the fact that that Hoover found out about the affair with Exner and rather than go to the press he actually went to the Kennedys with Robert Kennedy and said “Hey tell your brother to knock it off.” Yeah hoover conspiracists say that was Hoover blackmailing the Kennedys and it could be i would not put it past Hoover but at the same time here’s another person who’s often misunderstood hoover was devoted to the concept of serving the the state right he was a bureaucrat parex salons as was Alan Dulles yes so these people certainly they were not white sheep they were certainly uh morally ambiguous but everything they did was in the idea of national security and making sure that the state was safe from its enemies namely the Soviet Union and so I can imagine I I can imagine um Hoover keeping this under wraps because what if the Russians got a hold of this right but of course he puts it in his do not file file which means that now Hoover’s got a hold of this and But the fact that he warned the Kennedys to stop it tell tells me that okay he you know he could have derailed Kennedy immediately with a little leak he didn’t do that and and and certainly he could or he could have gone to the CIA and say you do it you leak it um he didn’t do that um just to change course do you want to tell us a bit about your class my class at school yes so well I teach a number of classes because so as I said I teach in the humanities department i have a history background so I like to teach everything kind of a from a historical perspective even though I don’t teach history per se um I teach the history of ideas and sometimes it pertains to religion or politics or ethics so uh there is a particular class that’s called knowledge and conspiracy theories i’ve been teaching it since I think 2008 so uh since I guess before some well next year my students will not have been born when I started teaching this course so I’m starting to feel old um uh and so I think it’s it’s it’s gone through a number of different iterations there are a number of different subjects that I like to look at obviously since I have the Kennedy book out I I do use the book as a as a textbook now but I think I can see myself kind of leaving the book for other people i know some other educators are using the book in their classrooms now and I’m very thankful for that uh but uh I might move on because right now I’m kind of doing a deep dive into eupfology uh I’m not saying I’m going to write a book on eupfology but there are some good ones out there and I might decide to make that my central theme so essentially what happens in this course is um uh as other teachers who teach similar titles knowledge and something else uh we all have to teach the basics of critical thinking and epistemology so what is knowledge what are different approaches to knowledge rationalism empiricism introspection revelation right there’s a number of ways that we claim to know things how reliable are they uh I look at things like paridolia you know looking at an image that is kind of confusing maybe a lot of visual noise and then seeing a shooter in the bushes or a flying saucer or something right so these are the different things that I look at that are more kind of generally related to epistemology the basics of inductive deductive logic and then and I’m starting this this week we’re hitting the Kennedy assassination so in fact uh starting tomorrow we will be watching the Oliver Stone film JFK Okay although sometimes depending on time I might watch something else we watched um uh was it JFK Revisited last year uh or maybe some other conspiracy film but you know even though it’s an older film JFK is kind of a one-stop shop for every conspiracy theory imaginable that’s right though it obsesses over the New Orleans thing so um uh we I end up making students write more about Garrison’s theories and then in class I talk more about ballistics and uh autopsy and and also about Lee Oswald’s psychology and things like that so over the next few weeks that’s what we’ll be doing we start with Oliver Stone’s uh theory then uh perhaps talking about how Gerald Pausner uh Patricia Lambert have responded to Stone and Garrison and then moving on to well what are the things that the video does not tell us about you know the the attempted assassination on um on General um I keep forgetting his name walker walker thank you uh Edwin Walker um I’m opening a parenthesis here this is really interesting um the fact that Edwin Walker had the same first name as Edwin Eddall Lee Oswald’s stepfather who cheated on Alswald’s mother and left or was forced to leave i forget where I read that but it’s kind of was really interesting that Oswald kept going after people who were the the dad he never had right so anyways I I close that because it makes it very interesting to see how someone like Lee Oswald in the context of all of the other assassins and and school shooters that we’ve seen in the 20th and 21st century most recently you know Thomas Matthew Krooks we’re still waiting for some kind of report i think the FBI is trying to find some kind of proof of a deep state in there but uh it appears like an Oswalt type of figure the more you understand shooters and what motivates them the less you need all of this cacophony of factoids um I I often talk to my students and this is one of the last class of the semester about my father meeting Mlein who you may be familiar with Americans will not be he was the shooter of the poly techchnique the University of Montreal shooter back in 1989 he killed 14 women blaming feminists for everything that was wrong in his life and my father was friends with his mom and I later met Makipin’s mom we had dinner she came and spoke to my students in many ways she’s a victim as well because she did not raise her son to act that way but she was physically abused and and emotionally abused by her husband who was a biggamist who also neglected the children both of whom ended up in tragic circumstances magnipin killed these women and killed himself his sister basically killed herself with heroin or drugs anyways um so I I look at Mle Pin as a type and then you know you put Lee Oswald you put Matthew Krooks you put a lot of these other people beside and you realize there’s a long line of a long pattern of people who pick up weapons particularly you know assault rifles or or or other types of of guns in the States and decide that they’re going to destroy someone and it doesn’t mean that they hate that person it means they are angry and they’re looking for something to tell the world I’ve had enough right and and I think Oswald was kind of like that i I know I’ve heard a lot of theories uh I’ve talked to former Warren Commission council Berg Griffin you know many people are not sure what exactly was Oswald’s motive but I think he fits a profile if it’s a profile of a person who is just empty and hopeless and the violence just allows them to stake to put that beacon in the ground saying here I stand look I’m somebody and you know what how is that different from from Oliver Stone who I don’t hasn’t shot anybody since Vietnam I hope but makes these films that says “Look I’m a somebody i matter i was hurt and I want to be vindicated you know I’m going to stand in front of Congress and say things that are absolutely false but I matter you know and I think that’s what it is it’s a cry for maybe not for help by that time it’s too late for help but it’s a cry for recognition right and how is that different from all human beings right we all want to be if not admired at least acknowledged and I see Oswald as a kind of a a very pathetic you know uh Shakespearean tragic character right so how do how do your students react to the whole Kennedy assassination and do they change their opinions over the course of of the course i think as most of my students are young you know they’re 17 18 when they start my class uh this is more it’s not a matter of debunking so much for them unless they have a a dad or an uncle who’s really into conspiracy theories there are some sometimes and they say it makes for very interesting conversations at home uh but I see it’s more like pre-bunking i I tell them look I apologize for assaulting you with all this historic history that you didn’t even know existed but I’ll show you why it matters as we go on during the term but there’s enough interest in things like true crime or esoterica you know when I deal with euphology or when students can do essays on you know who shot Tupac Shakur or why did Princess Diana die or how did she die you know uh a lot of students are emotionally invested in those things so I think they can’t help but see that Kennedy is not only is it like that it’s it’s the mother of all conspiracy theories uh so I’m sure some students are bored but you know I could be dancing naked there and they’d be bored anyways uh so uh you can’t please everybody but I would say that a lot of students realize that um this is a this is a very deep and complex uh story but fortunately you don’t need to know everything to start kind of unraveling the yarn you know I I on the first day of the semester I say “This is a crash course in [ __ ] detection and if you remember nothing about Kennedy after the semester I don’t care but I do care if you go back to your social media um you know um services you know I don’t even know what they’re called because I don’t use them you know your your Tik Toks or your whatever it is your Instagram.” And then and then you just swallow some more BS you know I said I want you to be able to look through advertisements political speeches conspiracy theories and other types of claims that are going to be abusive and manipulative and that’s the purpose of the course so I’ve always treated Kennedy UFOs and these other things as just a a case study in order to help them think for themselves i I don’t do this alone i did not invent this course a colleague of mine did uh James Jervis and I’m very very thankful that he proposed it way back when and uh you know we do have some basic stuff that I had to learn myself before I could teach it but the Kennedy part is something that was kind of a boule was that in English uh you know a thing I was dragging along my leg you know like in those cartoon prison uh I I was dragging this heavy uh ball of iron right we all have that ball we’re all dragging it and then I I realized I I could put some training wheels on it and turn it into something that was more positive you know a a learning experience so okay tell tell me tell us a bit about your podcast uh so back in 2018 or so you know every now and then I think I every now and then we get a midlife crisis i think I’ve had three by now and in the mid to late 2010s I was starting to feel like I do I want to teach until retirement i might want to do something else i even looked into some jobs in government i had thought about running for municipal politics i don’t think any of those things would have been suitable for me and then a friend of mine said another colleague he says “Why don’t you start a podcast?” And I knew nothing about the technology of producing stuff so I thought I can’t do that but fortunately I have a friend who is in the movie industry um Joan Lejo he’s my co-host co-producer and he knew a lot about it in fact his uh his ex-wife was a recording artist so he had a lot of experience with video audio technology which was exactly what I was missing i can write I can research I can tell stories i think I have a I have an okay voice for the radio you know I did some uh student radio when I was uh in in Sea myself so I thought well I guess I do have a certain skill set and so we started prepping this and it’s been going on for almost 5 years now uh three seasons but it seems like I I don’t know when a season should be over and uh at first I thought I’m gonna talk to just a few academics you know Joe Yuzinski came on uh I met a psychiatrist from the University of Chicago uh who was on and then eventually I thought I got to get to this Kennedy stuff eventually uh but not yet i didn’t want to just start with that but eventually you know I got around to doing a very long series on Kennedy and now I’m doing a long series on UFOs i guess those would be the two main themes uh I did one very interestingly on on cults and cultishness and I learned a lot in that i’ve always had an interest in these these groups not necessarily religious groups nexium is not a religious group but these very exclusive communities that would take advantage of people’s goodwill and desire for community right and completely turn that against them and and that’s when I learned not to shy away from the word cult if by cult you don’t mean a religious group you don’t agree with but rather uh an organization that abuses its members by gaslighting them by isolating them by disciplining them right so I looked at Scientology i looked at the church of unification i looked at Did you look at Jonestown i did i did i did like a three I did three episodes on Jonestown because I got to talk with um See it’s it was a while I’m trying to remember his name

um I I’ve got a blank but it it’s there i’ll I’ll scream it out in the middle of the night uh when I remember it but he’s the um he’s the director of the Jonestown Institute uh which is uh attached to the University of San Diego and uh his wife sisters his two uh sisters-in-law died in Jonestown uh one of them actually was one of Jim Jones’s mistresses and I think she had a child with him possibly so uh yeah so it’s very interesting because there’s a whole personal story the reason I bring that up is because Mark Lane was also involved with uh with Jim Jones yes and when I found that out I I was livid because it was one thing for Mark Lane to say silly things about Lee Oswald and try to sneak into the Warren Commission’s uh you know um auditions uh their their their uh audiences uh it was another thing when I found out and there’s even recordings of of him telling the people in Jonestown that the CIA wants to murder them and he was there on that day and of course he didn’t take the Kool-Aid he ran into the forest he ran into the jungle and survived and to this day I still wonder if he has survivors guilt and I don’t know because he was such a you know we use the word shy i don’t want to use that in a derogatory way but I think I think he fit the bill of the lawyer type who will make up anything in order to win the case and he used this he honed these skills arguing that Lee Oswald was set up uh by the CIA but he ultimately I think is partly responsible i mean Jim Jones bears the majority of the the blame but he is partly responsible for that massacre uh and so to me that is one of the examples of how deadly conspiracy theories can be uh it is shameful yeah yeah so getting back to your podcast oh can I can I say yes sure go ahead fielding McGee i remember Fielding McGee so I want to thank Fielding and I I apologize for uh for forgetting his name um can you recommend to our audience a good book on UFOs that debunks stuff well uh I had Greg Age on my podcast last fall and he has written the first well technically it’s the second comprehensive history of eupfology but the first was written by a man who now has been largely discredited as a bit of a nutbag uh eupfologist himself um so I think that Greg wrote a fantastic um chronicle of 50 years of the UFO uh movement let me see if I can find it here somewhere it’s it’s in my it’s in my office somewhere around here i forget where I put it um and it’s called uh when the when the flying saucers came so that I would say is a great book and it’s one that you can start with if if you like to read history and you read it slowly because every five pages or something it moves on to uh some other case and it looks not just in the United States but around the world so I thought that was a fantastic book for me to read uh I’ve been going back and reading some older uh UFO debunking books by Robert Schaefer by um Philip Klass uh these are all kind of you know I think I think they were remarkable men who spent decades and decades you know kind of holding holding the the the the fort of of critical thinking of uh of sober second thought uh to this movement that I hesitate to say cultish i think eupfologists are a little bit more open to outsiders and but they they definitely don’t like apostates uh you know people like us of course you have the people who mil things together who say JFK was killed because he was going to spill the beans about UFOs yeah that’s true but I I don’t see a lot of those maybe I’m just not reading those books but the the I would say the central euphologist today people like Nick Pope who was on my podcast nice guy but at the same time I think Nick Pope’s Nick Pope’s business is to promote Nick Pope and he does a good job at it but if you’re going to be on Ancient Aliens you’ve lost my you’ve lost my you’ve lost credibility in my eyes uh Leslie Kaine who I to me is uh she’s the Oliver Stone of the UFO world um you know a lot of these people I don’t think get into candidate you know what’s interesting they don’t even get into Roswell because they understand they know that nothing happened at Roswell a trail of balloons holding up a microphone essentially to listen in on whether the Russians were exploding nuclear bombs that’s what crashed at Roswell you know Project Mogul it was called and there’s no evidence of anything else what they found was the remnants of a box kite tin foil wax paper balsa wood glue and tape that’s what was found and then the story evolved into a huge flying saucer in fact several crashing all over New Mexico and they all know that it’s not the case and they all know that evidence is not there but they keep saying something happened at Roswell and then they keep using expressions like Britain’s Roswell Canada’s Roswell uh Brazil’s Roswell and at the end if there was no Roswell then all these other things are are to be doubted as well so you know you know that I I publish on my blog a uh a letter from Ray Palmer to Jim Garrison okay uh because they were friends and so uh they were all comparing notes about Fred Chrisman and what happened in Puet Sound with UFOs yeah yeah so I I found uh this letter that um that Ray Palmer had sent Garrison i did not find Garrison’s letter back to him unfortunately yeah palmer’s the guy who was running like a science fiction magazine and when he was when he found out that Kenneth Arnold had seen these quote unquote saucers skipping on water on he didn’t even describe them as saucers he described them as bat wings it’s very important to point out that what Kenneth Arnold saw were shiny distant bat wings moving like the the tail of a kite or he said saucers skipping on water so that was to describe their movement not their appearance but then Ray Palmer and other people flying saucers wow that’s catchy and they started talking about flying saucers and then for the next 50 years people are seeing what they’re not seeing bat wings they’re seeing flying saucers so no one’s seeing what uh what what Kenneth Arnold saw which I I’m almost convinced we’re pelicans but because of parallax because of glare in the sun the fact that he was expecting to see something unusual and and deep down he Kenneth Arnold was looking for a downed plane he took 20 minutes off in a transit from around Seattle to not Boise but he was kind of going into the interior across the mountains and he’d heard about this crashed Marines um transport plane that had crashed around Mount Reineer and there was was it a $5,000 award i mean a lot of money for 1947 uh he certainly could have that could have been half his year’s salary right and uh he didn’t find anything and on his way back he sees these lights now I’m not saying he made that up but it was convenient that when you when you got sucked out of 5,000 $5,000 and you can actually see something that might bring in the same kind of income and attention you know it it it kind of didn’t take too much for Kenneth Arnold to just go with the story he went to the media you know this was not a shy man who want to keep it to himself he went to multiple media outlets say “Guess what I saw?” And then he wrote a book and he became a euphologist did you follow the the Fred Chrisman story no which one’s that that’s the Pugid Sound hoax that’s the one in Nova Scotia no don’t no that’s right that’s right out in Washington State with him and and a friend and they were out logging and they claimed they saw these flying saucers and there were a beam came out of the flying saucers and and it killed the dog and and there was stuff on this island that they could get yes yes and and uh it was all a hoax of obviously but they that Ken they called Kenneth Arnold in That’s right and he believed it was true he got these two guys from the Air Force to investigate and the tragedy was the two guys from the Air Force their plane crashed on the way back and they both died yeah I remember that greg Agillian does write about that in in his book uh yeah and that’s interesting because of course when something happens like that and the people who host die uh then the story kind of dies with them or at least the the ability to disprove it dies with them uh and then it becomes larger than life it becomes another myth and you know one of the things that really uh uh sort of made Edward J epstein think was when he went to Sylvia Mar’s apartment for the first time and he saw all of her UFO books on a bookcase oh yeah and that got him uhoh what’s going on here okay she was very much into UFOs okay sylvia Mars i’m not Is she related to Jim Mars and anything no no sylvia Mar accessories after the fact oh oh oh yes i say I didn’t pronounce her name that way in my head i guess uh it’s it’s spelled uh m h e r okay i always thought it was meager i always Sylvia Mar okay my my mistake sorry i And I know that um Leslie Kane I pronounce it Keen all the time but uh you know all the Irish soccer players called Keen we pronounce it keen so I don’t know why she’d be any different so I hope you’re not at risk of having having to teach your course in French are you with some of the new laws interesting you might say that um I’ve been asked to teach the ethics course in French my college has decided to do that i’m I can teach in French i’m a franophhone though I’ve been teaching in English since 2001 but you know what i don’t think it’s right um I I I know I know this is not the subject of your podcast but uh you know Canadian politics is something I’ve always been interested in i majored in it in my undergrad and even at that time I want to go into politics uh I was uh you know as Canadians know what a federalist is or a separatist is i was a I was I was a centrist conservative federalist up until the Charlotte Town Accord or the the lack of an accord and then I think I kind of followed a lot of people like Lucen Bousuchard out the door and I became a a separatist a Quebec nationalist for a couple decades and then uh the the Quebec government started becoming very xenophobic against religious minorities uh and and other groups as well and that’s when I kind of thought you know I don’t know if I want to be part of this movement and I found my way back to a more kind of a centrist conservative federalist position which ironically we don’t have a party to represent us right now right it’s uh all the other parties been taken over in different directions so what’s happened in Quebec in the last few years according to me is very unfortunate rather than encouraging people to want to participate in the franophhone um you know nature of this province you have a very rich French history uh I mean the Catholic Church has been basically thrown out the window but there’s a lot of the um you know there’s a lot of the cultural elements there of Quebec’s history that I think it’s worth preserving and the language as well the problem is you can’t do that putting a gun to people’s heads and Quebec also has institutions that have been you know protected English-speaking institutions including hospitals and and seeps and high schools that I think need to maintain funding and their ability to teach to uh anglophones uh who who are born and raised in Canada and that’s what my college is meant to do and now suddenly we are compelled to teach more French get rid of our complimentary courses that this is unfortunate when I was in SEAP you could um take up to four classes and things had nothing to do with your concentration i took a class called the history of African-American rock i took a class on uh poetry uh I took an astronomy class these all really first of all they helped me de develop an interest in these things and and and they really helped kind of give me some some some cultural richness and now all this is dumped in order to make people ready for the working uh you know for for the working world and that includes just drilling them with a lot of French including making them take classes in French where it might not be their mother tongue i mean a lot of our our students do come from a a French background they can hack it but that’s not why they’re in an English- speakaking sea they’re there to actually become bilingual and so it was interesting up until the 19 up until the the early 2000s um most Canadian politicians who want to be successful across the board you know being elected as prime minister or leader of the oper opposition had to be bilingual and very often that meant they were franophones from Quebec or maybe from Ontario who also spoke very good English but since I’d say 2005 or six what’s interesting is it’s the Anglo uh politicians who are learning French and they’re the ones who are actually you know being more bilingual steven Harper Pierre Puv uh you know uh Jack Leighton right the none of these people come from Quebec and then they come and they can debate in French in Quebec and the Quebec nationalists are the ones who can’t express themselves in English as well as they used to now there are some exceptions i think that the block leader is is quite uh fluent but well you it also used to be that the well Renie Lec and a lot of the PQ leaders were very good in English we had gone to English schools uh abroad or elsewhere in Canada but yes I I you know when I grew up in Montreal I mean there was no French language immersion in public schools which was I really regret i mean I really wish they had French language immersion where I could have all we got was a half an hour of French a day oh okay and and our teachers were all from France because they really weren’t sure how to teach French and we used to have these horrible arguments in class about which word to use um various times and and so thank God that’s changed but I also think franophhone should have the opportunity if they wish to go to school in English um it’s very isolating when you you teach a a people to close in on themselves and Quebec for the last 50 years has been very open internationally um
if anything it’s because of the voters in Quebec that we had free trade with the United States for 30 years until Donald Trump decided it shouldn’t be anymore uh we had always a a very big

opinion and and they’re exporting Kebekqua culture in a way that is much bigger than actually the sum of its parts but the problem is what we’re seeing now is the people who are bilingual and triilingual and being effective are more and more people who come from the the minorities the Anglo and alophone minorities in Quebec rather than franophones and to me that’s that’s shameful uh when I was in university my hero was Ten Kier he was the co-founder of modern Canada in many ways with John A macdonald uh fortunately no one’s been attacking his statues maybe because he’s been forgotten but uh you know he’s a person who saw a great advantage to this bilingual bicultural uh you know non-American view of of a state here in North America and I I think it’s to our loss if Canada doesn’t preserve that um I know you might know I’m a member of the Aristotle Foundation and I’m a senior fellow and uh their view a bit like Qulette magazine which we’ve both contributed to is very much kind of a radical centrism you know some people say they lean right but they only lean right in the sense that they lean in the favor of common sense and if people on the right start acting crazy then they’re going to talk they’re going to speak up against that as well i love Qulett quette is just I just I just adore Colette oh my god john Kay does some good work you know he used to be at the National Post but uh I think maybe the National Post was a bit too right-wing for his flavor not that it was like super rightwing when he was there but he’s he’s a diehard centrist and uh he’s been to my college he’s spoken to my students uh you know uh he’s been on my podcast and and I really appreciate the work that he does i think we need more journalists like that there’s not enough there’s not enough in Canada definitely okay look I think we’ve uh reached the end of our time um again I well thank you very much but I strongly recommend that everybody go out and buy a copy of this book there will be links in the notes uh below and in the blog post accompanying this interview so go and buy Michelle’s book buy two copies give one to a friend they will thank you uh immensely and so um thank you i will thank you too thank you very much yes thank Thank you thank you Fred it was great to be here

okay so I’m going to stop the

recording if I can find the button it’s going to be edited