There was a post responding to criticisms of Fred Litwins blog post of November 24, 2025.
this is my response to that response:
I think anyone who follows Judith Vary Baker could be considered a “cult” in that they are following a single leader- her. Although it seems to be a benign cult in that I don’t think Baker exerts any control over their lives. They may have bought her book and might follow her writing online, but she isn’t trying to control them in any other way- its not a high control group like Scientology or Nexium or the followers of some Charlie Manson/Teal Swan character. Does this “real JFK Jr.” person lead a cult? I’ve never heard of him before so I am going to assume he doesn’t have a cult following ( or am I wrong about that?) Hardcore conspiracy believer Dick Gregory described the critics of the Warren Report as “a kind of a cult” although its a cult he eagerly wanted to join.
I’m not sure the word “cult” is the right word to describe believers of a certain thing in regards to the Kennedy Assassination . At least not compared to actual high control groups like Scientology/Nexium etc.. Maybe the right word might be “camp” or “movement” or …… I dunno- somebody help me out on this one- whats the right word for this? Its overly simplistic to say that Conspiracy believers are all in one cult, while Lone Gunman believers are in a seperate rival/competing cult. There is NOT a single person or ideology at the center of these groups. Whats the difference between a religion and a cult? Comedian Joe Rogan joked that “in a cult, theres one guy who knows this is all made-up bulls–t, in a religion, that guys dead” Is judaism a cult? No. There are numerous different offshoots of Judaism: orthodox, reform, modern reformed, etc. Although I would argue that some of the extremely Orthodox Judaism meet most medical definitions of a cult in that the group controls where the members live, how they dress, what they can read, who they can marry, what they eat, etc.. Is Christianity a cult? No, but some Christian groups like Jehovahs Witness, extreme mormonism, the Catholic “Opus Dei” group (among others) definitely fit the definition of a cult. If you watch all the episodes of “On the Trail of Delusion” you will see that Fred Litwin found a long list of people who are on the Lone Gunman side BUT if you listen closely, have a disparity of opinions on specific matters. For example: In Episode Two we hear from Robert Wagner (author of the book, JFK Assassinated) who doesn’t think there was a second shooter, but he disagrees with the Warren Report in that he thinks there was a fourth show. (Most Lone Gunman types DON’T agree with him on that.) In Episode Six, we have Gus Russo, who thinks Lee Oswald acted alone, ( no second gunman) but he believes that Cuba might have provoked him to act. Episode 7, has Dave Perry, who has spent years dubunking many theories, but he still believes there might have been some kind of conspiracy.
On the Conspiracy side there are dozens, if not hundreds of seperate competing ( and completely contradictory) ideas about what happened. One shooter, two shooters, three shooters, a dozen shooters…. a shooter in the sewer drain, a half dozen different and contradictory shooters on the knoll, a shooter from the other side of the street, the limo driver shot JFK, a secret service agents rifle accidentally discharged, a shooter somehow right next to railroad workers on the overpass, a second shooter in three different windows on the 6th floor, a shooter on the 5th floor, a shooter on the seventh floor, a shooter on the roof etc etc etc the list is almost limitless. (Almost) every conspiracy book has the position that THEY are right and all the other conspiracy books are either wrong or lies. Whenever I go to “JFK Truth Be Told” meetups I often have to bite my tongue when someone says something I disagree with, but we all still (more or less) get along. There is no one all powerful group leader telling us what to think. Neither side has a uniformity of belief, and thus, in my mind, shouldn’t be called a high controlled cult.
So maybe the word “cult” is too extreme, and I think perhaps the word “camp” or “movement” might be a better word, However, using the word “cult” or “cults” to describe competing schools of thought coming up against each other isn’t exactly wrong either. I don’t think ONE (possibly) mis-chosen word in Fred Litwins essay/travel blog undermines his overall premise. That on November 22, 2025 ( in my words) the harbor of Dealey Plaza was clogged with competing armadas of boats full of conspiracy theorists and Fred had an amusing time navigating through them. It is HIS blog and in HIS opinion these groups look like cults.
These videos were shot with an iPhone and edited with Adobe After Effects and Adobe Premiere.
I created the lower third super in Adobe Photoshop and animated with Adobe After Effects.
Episode 2, What Lee Bowers saw from the railroad tower:
The opening and closing motion graphics were created with Adobe Photoshop and Adobe After Effects.
Episode 3, the actual Lee Bowers crash site:
Episode 4:
Episode 5:
These videos were written by Canadian author Fred Litwin as a satire on the numerous conspiracy theories about the assassination oh President John F. Kennedy on November 22, 1963.
Welcome to another edition of On the Trail of Delusion, where we try to separate the wheat from the chaff and try to give you something interesting on the JFK assassination as opposed to some of the ridiculous slop you’ll see on the internet and on YouTube.
So today my special guest is Adam Gorightley who is an author who has written many many books but also has a terrific website http://www.historiadiscordia.com which you’ll see a link to in the bottom and his articles have appeared in all sorts of publications on the internet underground magazines countercultural publications. But what’s of real interest to us here on this podcast is that Adam has done some absolutely fundamental amazing work on people like Kerrie Thornley, Fred Chrisman, Thomas Beckham, and Raymond Brochures. These are all names that sort of came out of or were associated with the Garrison investigation. And so I’m very happy to have Adam with me today. And Adam, tell us how you got into, looking at some of these characters.
Yeah, thanks for having me on, Fred. Well, let’s start with Kerrie Thornley. Back in the early 90s or so I became aware of him probably even earlier than that. I was during that period uh like I start had started writing for Z and I was really interested in conspiracy theories and UFOs and paranormal and all this kind of far out stuff. Thornley came into my awareness. First of all, I saw some articles he had written for a Zine called FACT SHEET FIVE, which was really an important Zine during that period. FACT SHEET FIVE was basically a catalog this guy named Mark Zunder put out listing all the Zines available. 2:42 He did this month after month, put a lot of work into it. And there was I saw a column called Conspiracy Corner by this Kerrie Thornley guy and it’s like I actually couldn’t make a lot of sense out of it but uh I became more aware of 3:01 him and as uh time went on uh I came across a book called Conspiracies Coverups and Crimes by an author named Jonathan Vankin you might be familiar with. 3:13 Yeah. and uh he was covering some of the more far out conspiracy theories in that 3:20 book becoming prevalent at the time and some of the characters one of whom was Kerrie Thornley 3:27 and just a thumbnail sketch Thornley had known Oswald and the Marines for a 3:34 short period of time then got sent over to Japan where uh Oswald had been 3:40 previously stationed at Atsugi and he was working on a book at during that 3:45 period called the IDLE WARRIORS which was like being a Marine during peace time, the cold war and kind of the 3:53 malaise and things going on with that period. And he based them uh the main 4:00 character in the book was Johnny Shelburn which Thornley based on 4:06 himself and other Marines he had known in that period including Lee Harvey Oswald. And so Thornley got over to uh 4:13 Japan and that’s when he around the time that Oswald defected and he went “whoa I’m going to change the focus of this book to be entirely on Oswald “you know. So that was kind of the first curiosity that he had known Oswald in that period and was writing a book about 4:32 Oswald uh prior to the Kennedy assassination. And so Venin covered that in his article 4:40 about Thornley. And he also got into some of the more far out theories 4:46 surrounding Thornley who was investigated and uh indicted by I’m not 4:52 sure if he was ever indicted. Fred Litwin: Yeah. No, he was. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. By Jim Garrison. And Garrison had these 5:01 smattering of theories. one that Thornley was the second Oswald that he 5:06 was connected to the military and the aerospace industry and they were somehow 5:11 involved and he also claimed that Thornley was CIA and uh on and on and on 5:18 and so Thornley denied all those accusations initially but then later like in the ‘7s 5:25 after the Garrison investigations he started thinking about that and he was also some would say suffering from uh 5:33 paranoid schizophrenia, which might have been uh helped along by, you know, the 5:40 prosecution of Jim Garrison causing that paranoia. But he started he 5:45 was looking back and he now by this time he was thinking, well, maybe Garrison got some things right. There was a lot 5:51 of odd stuff going on during that period. And how did I happen to run a, 5:57 you know, my paths and Oswald come together? Was there some other sinister force there? You know, was the 6:04 conspiracy setting him up as an alternative pepsi? So he started 6:09 believing all these things or entertaining these uh notions and uh 6:15 ultimately at one point he started to believe he was a part of the MK Ultra 6:21 project and that he he and Oswald were part of a Nazi breeding experiment to 6:27 create, you know, these future assassins of America. his life kind of spiraled 6:32 out of control during that period. But and so that was kind of a nutshell of uh 6:37 Thornley in that book uh Venin put out. It was just one chapter and I I was 6:43 fascinated by the guy started collecting materials and 6:48 uh Ven said it one point he was uh considering um writing a biography of 6:56 Thornley. I go, “Oh man, I’ll love it when that came out.” But he never got around to that and I had this material 7:03 and eventually I had enough content I felt to pursue writing a book on 7:09 Thornley and that turned out to be the prankster and the conspiracy which was published in u 2003. So I guess you’re 7:18 asking how I became interested in these characters. that was one of the characters and how they became 7:23 and and and you also published uh this book Caught in the Crossfire um which I have to say is an absolutely fantastic 7:30 book and anybody anybody interested in Carrie Thornly this is the book to get. 7:36 It’s chalk full of primary sources, documents, photographs, stories. I mean 7:42 it’s it’s absolute essential reading and you’ll find links to it in in the comments below. 7:47 Came into contact. How did this happen? It was kind of odd how I came into contact. We were never quite clear how 7:53 our paths crossed, but I met up with a guy named Bob Newport. And uh this was 7:59 after I wrote the Thornly book. I think I might have Yeah, I interviewed him for the Thornly book actually. He was 8:05 friends with Thornley uh growing up and he uh mentioned he had some Discordian 8:12 archives and I didn’t even mention that uh Thornley and a buddy of his named 8:17 Greg Hill started this spoof religion back in the late 1950s called 8:23 Discordianism which is the worship of the Greek goddess and of chaos and discord. It was kind of started as a 8:30 spoofed religion but became a kind of collective for different artists where they shared ideas and it was kind of a 8:38 platform to u kind of riff on uh 8:45 different religions and philosophy and politics. And it was a circle of different writers and artists that 8:53 exchanged uh sometimes humorous stuff, collages. They had these things called 8:59 groovy packs where they’d send a bunch of things in a uh envelope with a joint 9:04 usually and you take the joint out and take a hit and put put your own spin on 9:09 this uh collection of materials sent to you and send it on to the next guy. And 9:14 a lot of this material became like these projects ended up in a book called the 9:19 Principia Discordia which you could say was uh kind of the Bible of Discordianism. So 9:26 anyway, where I was going with all this and here’s a here’s a book that that you know another very important book uh uh 9:34 the sort of the origins of uh the Discordian Society which you were you were part of writing this book 9:40 right and that’s where I was going. um Newport told me at one point uh he had 9:48 some uh what he called the Discordian archives and I actually met him at at 9:54 Robert Anton Wilson’s house in like 2001 and he brought an armload of this material and I thought, “Oh, this is 10:00 some great uh stuff.” You know, I’d like to maybe use it for a book at uh some 10:06 point. He said, “Well, you’re welcome to do that. I’ll let you I’ll let you take some of this along. There’s more I 10:12 have.” But so I borrowed that and scanned it and started working on this book. And later on, we’re like in 2009 10:19 or so, he said, I was in LA where he lived and he said, “Well, come on over and you can have everything.” And it 10:24 turned out to be oh, a dozen of boxes, which was all the material that Greg Hill had put together 10:32 for these uh archives over the years. And a lot of them were I mean, he just saved everything. He’s all his 10:40 correspondents and he’s saved, you know, the carbons of what he sent out to 10:45 people and there was just a wealth of material and some of that stuff in there was uh files on the garrison 10:53 investigations and a lot of uh communications Thornley was having with different people during that period. saw 11:01 that the material that kind of fell in my lap uh has been used for these 11:07 different projects. Is that is that material in in some sort of physical archive somewhere? 11:13 I’m actually uh working on that right now. The archive is at my house here. 11:19 Okay. And u it should be going into a uh library archive. Uh it’s probably going 11:27 to happen at the end of this uh year or early uh next year. Uh more news 11:34 to follow on that. But uh yeah, I’ve been working it placing it at a library 11:40 for quite some time and uh university library. 11:46 That’s good. I um I’m struck with with Thornley in the fact that you know Garrison went so far as to think that he 11:53 was the body in the in the Oswald photograph in the backyard you know and 11:59 I mean it’s just and and and what’s amazing is you know bro people like brochers were sort of into selling that 12:07 as well you know you know oh I know I recognize those hips you know I mean it’s it’s so ridiculous 12:14 I guess we Oswald is the one who started that rumor cuz I think he’s 12:20 Was it he or someone and said that Well, that’s not me. My head’s been super imposed on uh that uh photo of me. Where 12:29 was it? In Fort Worth or wherever he Yeah, it was in his backyard in down in Dallas on Ne holding the communist 12:37 literature in one hand and I guess the rifle. I’ve been there. I’ve been to that house. Oh, backyard. 12:43 And so anyway, that kind of rumor got started and uh Garrison heard about it 12:50 and uh he just pick up on these things. Um Thornley’s dad was a photo engraver 12:57 of some sort. So he thought that his father or Thornley would have had 13:03 the skills to do that and that. But then brochures testified. I guess it was 13:10 brochures who really said, “Yeah, that was uh Thorn Lee in the backyard posing 13:16 as Oswald.” And that started a lot of the second Oswald stuff. And there was 13:22 witnesses uh Garrison said he had several witnesss who saw Thornley with 13:28 Marina Oswald, but that never really panned out when I was looking at there was one witness who came forward, but 13:35 you know, it all seemed sketchy. was Yeah. And and I mean he he he told I 13:41 mean he even wrote a memo to the HSCA about the backyard photograph and you know how lucky we might be because the 13:48 father was a photo engraver. And then you know he he was just so insistent. Garrison so believed that Thornley was 13:55 in New Orleans um when Oswald was there and they must 14:00 have crossed paths because Barbara Reed you know said that you know they had been together. 14:06 another character write about. Yeah. And there was some overlap as I 14:11 recall because there was a few weeks. Yeah. Uh them being at the same who knows. 14:18 Well, yeah. You would have thought uh Thornley would have recognized Oswald 14:24 quite obviously, but and if he had seen Oswald, he would have been really interested in talking to him 14:29 and really uh there’s no reason to hide that. I mean, he would have been really interested. 14:34 Barbara Reed claims she saw them together in a coffee house or a 14:40 restaurant. And uh then if you look through some of that materials, there 14:45 supposedly was a second witness and there was an affidavit uh produced by this fellow. I forget his 14:52 name, but it was never signed. So it seemed like one of those things where Reed or Garrison put it together and 14:59 say, “Here, sign this so we can have another witness.” and whoever it was didn’t sign it. That kind of tells you 15:05 something. Um, yeah, Reed was a character herself. We talked about the Discordian society, 15:12 this kind of prank religion of these uh it was a real mix of like libertarians, bohemians, uh, 15:21 pranksters. And really when it started in the Southern California, it was just 15:28 three guys. uh Hill Thornley and Bob Newport. But when they went to New 15:34 Orleans, they uh kind of started in New Orleans branch of the Discordian Society 15:40 there with a another character called Roger Leven who kind of got sucked into 15:46 the Garrison Investigation at one point. And Barbara Reed was involved and Reed claimed that she was the goddess Iris 15:53 herself. She was involved in all kinds of stuff. I mean, she was uh pretty 15:59 fundamental to the uh resurrection of the old style jazz scene being uh 16:07 reinvigorated there in New Orleans. That’s something certainly positive you can say about her. And uh 16:13 but she was also one some people described her as she was somebody who 16:19 always put herself in the middle of these different situations whether she 16:25 whether she actually had any uh connection to them and you know there’s rumors that her and Garrison had some 16:33 type of relationship and and she was basically 16:38 kind of like Jack Martin uh initially a witness but Then they become part of the 16:44 investigation team. So you can see how this whole thing was so conflicted, you 16:50 know. Yeah. And Weisberg would spend a lot of time at Barbara Reed’s house and and trying to sort of get information from 16:58 her or bounce ideas off of her and they’d all meet at her house, all these people together and and it was like a 17:05 cauldron of rumors. I mean I mean New Orleans, everybody was talking in New Orleans. 17:11 I think Thornley made the mistake. At some point he met uh Reed uh he’d 17:18 returned to New Orleans for a little bit of time like in ‘ 64 after the assassination and the topic came up and 17:27 I think she confronted him at that time saying well yeah I saw you uh with 17:33 Oswald don’t you remember that? He’s going, “Well, no, you know, I think I guess it 17:40 could have been possible and I didn’t recognize him.” And that kind this opened up the 17:46 the whole thing to spin out of control. 17:52 Yeah. And I, you know, I feel I feel for for Thornley. I mean, he was dragged to New Orleans and indicted and he didn’t 17:58 have a lawyer and and uh you know, these gar, you know, the garrison’s men are trying to convince him of whole variety 18:05 of things and cross-examining him and and uh you know, I mean, my god, he was 18:10 put through the ringer and then you had the ridiculous Harold Weisberg actually asking I think Fred Nukem to can you 18:18 draw some some whiskers on a picture of Thornley to make him look like Oswald. 18:23 Yeah, I was looking at some of that uh material today and somehow 18:29 Thornley did have a lawyer at one point named Lavine and somehow they came 18:34 across this correspondence with the DA’s office with uh Fred Nukem and they sent 18:41 Weisberg was involved. They sent a photo of Thornley out of the Tampa Times and 18:46 they asked uh N uh Nukem if he could retouch it. a lot of basically the 18:52 hairline to uh make him look more like Oswald. I guess they’re pursuing this uh 18:59 theory. So once again, uh who I don’t know exactly what they did with that 19:04 photo, but it wouldn’t be surprised me if his investigators had the touched up photo and taken around. Do you recognize 19:13 this uh fellow, you know, and and then Weisberg wrote the letter on DA stationery and then 19:19 Yeah. Yeah. To make it look all official. And it was just a bizarre bizarre incident. 19:26 And then I mean and then David Lifton got involved because he became friends with Carrie Thornley and realized this 19:33 is all silly. Yeah. And so he started writing about that out in Los Angeles. It was just um an 19:40 interesting Sylvia Maher was a friend of Carrie Thornley’s. Mhm. Yeah. She wrote a letter uh kind of 19:47 defending him. Uh and uh yeah, they exchanged several letters and 19:52 and he sent her a lot of Discordia stuff and and they exchanged letters and and I 19:58 think she contributed to his defense fund and you know she she early on realized this is all so ridiculous. 20:06 But he was Thornly was uh poking the bear we might say when it came to uh 20:11 Garrison. Uh he was he wrote a few different things saying how Garrison was 20:18 an out of control authoritarian and things like this and they even became 20:25 part of a Discordian prank called called Operation Mindfuck 20:30 right where uh and it had to do part of that came out of um there was that dude 20:37 Howland Chapman who I guess was supposedly an investigator. He’s a Gilly 20:42 Plaza regular as they called him. And uh he was a John Burch Society guy who 20:49 believed that the Illuminati was involved in the assassination which was a pretty common kind of John Burchian 20:57 thing at that time that was being spread. But he was the one who came up with, as I understand it, he got a hold 21:04 of those uh three [ _ ] photos and got those to uh Garrison. 21:09 Anyway, Thornley heard about Chapman and Chapman was the one who really convinced Garrison that there was a shot from the 21:15 sewer, right? That Yeah, that too. You know, so you have this you have this 21:20 thing Chapman goes to see Garrison, convince him there’s a shot in the from the sewer and like one day later Garrison is issuing press releases, you 21:27 know, there’s a shot from the sewer. I mean, it’s we’ve we’ve solved it. There was whatever 21:33 two men, three men men, six men, men on the triple overpass. It was 21:39 constantly changing, you know, but he denounced it like we’ve solved it. It’s over. 21:44 Yeah. It’s a done deal. Um I was going to say this. So this Illuminate Illuminati 21:51 thing tickled Thornley and Robert Anton Wilson, these other guys and they got interested in uh 21:58 researching the Illuminati and they tied it into the Discordian society and some of the prank letters they sent I mean 22:05 they’d send stuff to like Welch with the John Burch Society and other people but 22:10 apparently they sent some to Garrison claiming yeah that the Illuminati was behind the assassination. 22:17 And I found one in Weisberg’s files. It was Robert Anne Ton Wilson wrote a spoof 22:24 letter along those lines to uh Weisberg. And Weisberg was one of the ser of this 22:30 bunch too, you know. 22:36 Well, yeah, in in a certain sense, but yeah. 22:42 So, so yeah, Thornley, you know, a fascinating character. Um uh but that 22:47 you know led you to write about you know people like uh Beckham Chrisman and Brochers. I don’t know if you want to 22:53 talk about one of those characters. Um, yeah, with brochures. Um, 23:01 I’ve been a reading Kennedy assassination books for a long time like you as a young man and u 23:10 you know I came came across uh oh different pro garrison stuff back in 23:18 the mid 80s or so you know and I go wow that’s a lot of his theories and the 23:26 people he claimed were perpetrators involved in the conspiracy. They show up 23:31 in other books. People were repeating this. So, it was and of course Oliver Stone ended up running with it. But, you 23:38 know, you see that stuff as a young guy and it’s like, wow, this is the district attorney of New Orleans. He’s got a lot 23:45 of power and you hear him talk, you know, charismatic guy and all that. It’s like, yeah, he start repeating this 23:52 stuff as fact. it, you know, later on you dig into it, it’s like, huh, maybe 23:58 not so much. Yeah. Um, so, uh, but I remember seeing brochers 24:04 mentioning a book, uh, by Bernard Festerald. Yeah. Coincidence or Conspiracy, I think it 24:11 was called. Yeah, it was a paperback book. Yeah. Which I have. Yeah. Bernard Festerwald. Yeah. And it’s like a who’s who and good 24:17 resource at the time. Um, and brochures was in there. And once again, it’s one of those characters. It’s like what? 24:23 This guy, they said he knew Ferry knew that Ferry was part of the assassination team, but 24:31 then brochures had also threatened the LBJ at one point. He was also involved 24:38 in UFOs. It’s like what is that this guy, you know? Then um 24:44 as I was writing the first Thornley book um 24:49 started coming across you know in the National Archive files of Garrison brochure statements and yeah he’s making 24:57 all these claims that uh Thornley was part of this group of 25:02 assassins that were also homosexuals and uh that somehow that was part of the 25:10 motive and he connected seemingly connected did Clay Shaw and Ferry and 25:15 Thornley to the assassination. And yeah, he had these crazier ideas like the 25:21 superimposed uh photo and I in uh in the Discordian archives I came across uh 25:29 other materials in the correspondence and I think you mentioned this in your book where a friend of uh Thorn Lee’s 25:37 named Luis Lacy had some interactions with brochures in the around 1970 you 25:42 know so I kind of incorporated that into the book and showed what a kind of she 25:49 she thought he was nuts. Um, it had to do with uh I don’t know if I need to go 25:55 into the all all the details, but uh but he he was another one of these characters kind of like Barbara Reed 26:02 involved in a lot of different stuff. Some of it seemed uh pretty positive, 26:07 you know, like he was helping homeless people in his mission there in San 26:12 Francisco. And he was he had a hand in uh what do he what was it the first uh 26:19 gay liberation day in San Francisco, but then he was somebody who’d always have a 26:24 falling out with people and got into a big row with lesbians in San Francisco. 26:30 So they kind of kicked him out in following years of being involved in the 26:36 gay liberation. So he kind of started his own. He he had this group called the Lavender 26:42 Panther which were like gay vigilantes that were take going to take on uh 26:49 people who were beating up gays and he was just always showing up in uh papers. 26:55 But he’s also kind of a unhinged guy who’s always getting into confrontations 27:00 with uh people and had mental issues. And here we go. This is one of your uh 27:06 you were you were a priest caller. He was sort of a supposed reverend, a man of the cloth, but uh but who knows how 27:14 real that is. And well, he got some credentials through the Universal Life Church, right? Yes. 27:19 Which anybody could get get at that time. And so you and so did uh the likes 27:25 of Fred Chrisman, uh Carrie Thornley. I mean, a lot of people were becoming universal life ministers for a lot of 27:32 different reasons. Tom Beckham as well. Uh part of it was to run scams. 27:39 You know, I think some people during the Vietnam War era thought they could avoid 27:44 the draft be becoming a minister. And so there’s a lot of different motivations, 27:49 but uh Garrison be came across that these guys were all ministers and stuff 27:56 that led to another one of his theories that they were these so-called somebody 28:01 later called these wandering bishops that were using these fringe or obscure 28:07 religious uh churches organizations as fronts to hide their activities as 28:15 political assassins. I mean, and part of that I think was based on 28:23 Jack Martin was feeding that them that information, but he was also involved in these groups as well, you know, uh, with 28:30 David Ferry. So, it’s like you’re involving all these other people’s, but your main witness witness 28:38 uh, you’re letting slide because he’s feeding you the information he want you 28:43 want to hear. you know, uh, Jack Martin. Jack Martin, another 28:49 crazy, unreliable narrator, just like Barbara Reed and, uh, Reverend Braymond 28:56 Raymond Brochures. And these were some of uh Garrison’s uh Yeah. I mean, I love the fact that that 29:01 brochures would went on went on uh a TV show and basically claimed that he had 29:07 channeled Lee RB Oswald at a seance, you know, and Oswald said, “Well, I’m 29:13 innocent.” You know, and and and that’s when the Garrison’s men really got interested. Oh, you know, well, he also 29:19 said he knew fairies, so they got interested. They they brought him to New Orleans. Of course, that was a great 29:24 holiday for brochures. He was off with the boys for a week, you know, having a great time. 29:31 Chrisman too got a vacation with he and his lawyer and he there was a big uh 29:36 Chrisman was trying to get more squeeze more money out of uh Garrison at the time. He was uh given $500 29:44 for he and his lawyer to go to New Orleans. And Gresman said, “Well, that 29:50 that’s not enough, you know, to pay our time.” But you look at $500 and 29:56 When was that? 19 68. 68. It’s more like uh I don’t know three 30:03 or $4,000. So was plenty. And he spent that weekend there and had a uh good 30:08 time apparently. Yeah. En enjoyed it. Uh 30:14 talking to I uh interviewed his son Fred Chrisman Jr. 30:20 who’s uh around. Oh wow. And uh he said that Yeah. He said that 30:25 uh Chrisman was uh absolutely thrilled, almost giddy to get the attention and go 30:32 to uh New Orleans. Uh Thornley’s wife or ex-wife that by that time wasn’t 30:38 thrilled at all. She was pissed and kind of upset by the whole thing. They were separated at the time. And so Fred 30:45 Chrisman Jr. had those memories. Do you think uh do you think I mean I mean Garrison learned about Chrisman through 30:52 uh and Beckham through an anonymous letter. Do you think Chrisman wrote that letter first? Yeah. First let me say Chrisman 30:59 had an extensive uh history of writing fake letters. So under uh assumed names. 31:07 Um some other insights from uh Fred Chrisman Jr. 31:14 But uh he lived with his his Chrisman and his wife were separated, 31:20 but uh Fred Jr. would visit like in the summer there in Tacoma. And Chrisman had 31:28 a uh office uh underground office, underground lair where he’d uh do what 31:36 uh Chrisman Jr. called uh his father would do his disinformation work. And 31:43 what he the setup he had uh he had there was a large desk there with three 31:48 different typewriters. So he he’d use different typewriters to produce letters, you know, that’d be harder to 31:54 trace. And he he’d collect uh different uh stuff like letter heads from 32:01 wherever, government agencies. if there was an estate sale or like a law firm 32:07 that went out of business, he’d collect different things that he could emboss to make it look official. So, there’s a lot 32:14 of evidence that he concocted a lot of letters and I have a few of those just 32:21 to show them in the book I’m working on on Chrisman. But unfortunately, a lot of 32:26 his files got his home files got tossed out. Chrisman Jr. has a few examples of 32:33 stuff and uh photos that he shared with me. So yeah, Chrisman had a history of 32:39 doing that. There’s two anonymous u letters. Uh the first one was uh 32:49 named five uh people who were involved who had information. So two of the 32:55 people named were Chrisman and Beckham. There was uh also uh Sergio Aracha and Lewis Rebel. 33:04 They were part of that friends of Democratic Cuba 33:11 anti-Castro uh group. Somehow they got lumped into this letter. And also somebody called 33:16 Martin Graci. There’s no Martin Graci. There was a Julio Graci. Uh so 33:24 and there was Bob Bob Lavender as well. Well, Bob came later. I guess he came 33:30 later. I think uh at least uh Garrison suspected 33:35 and Boxley, his investigator, they suspected he wrote this uh letter. It 33:41 wasn’t signed, but he’s connected to that letter. And that’s why Boxley went 33:46 to interview him about that. and he had some of the same information that appeared in that 33:52 letter. So, it’s hard to say exactly if uh 33:58 uh Lavender what his role was. Was he just repeating that information he had heard overheard 34:07 from Beckham and Chrisman or was he a collaborator in this uh farce? So, there 34:14 was that letter. Then there was the uh second anonymous letter 34:20 that that first anonymous letter was like 67 and early 68 uh was the one that 34:28 is just a one-page letter anonymous not signed to anybody. There’s this guy you 34:33 need to check on in Tacoma Chrisman. Uh he travels around the 34:40 country and he’s involved in this thing. Jim, you need to look at this guy. 34:46 Whatever. And that that seems more like a uh Chrisman letter. You just don’t 34:52 know for sure, you know. Yep. But Chrisman had this habit of or 34:59 he was trying to build this mystique around himself. I mean, it goes back to the UFO days and 35:07 uh I believe hoaxing the Mory Island UFO incidents in his letters about 35:14 battling the underground creatures, the daros in Burma during World War II. it 35:20 he was just creating this uh mystique around himself as this action 35:27 man who was involved in paranormal events and was a deep cover secret 35:34 agent. There is the famous uh document called the easy papers. Are you familiar with that? 35:40 Yeah. And I’m pretty sure Chrisman concocted that. It’s like a six-page 35:48 document allegedly written by an analyst at CIA who pulled Chrisman’s uh file to 35:57 lay out this information about him. And it’s obviously a hoax, but yeah, it 36:03 reads just like uh other Chrisman um 36:08 hoax letters. I shared that with Fred uh Chrisman Jr., Right. And 36:15 I’m not I’m not a big fan of AI or any of that, but he said we got a my son and 36:21 wife uh want to run this through chat GPT to compare it to uh his book Murder 36:28 of the City Tacoma, right? Which is right here. Yep. And according to Chatch GPT, 36:37 uh it’s the same author. Huh. Okay. What that means, I don’t know. There’s a 36:43 lot of slop that’s comes with AI, but it it was an interesting analysis. 36:50 Yeah. So, yeah. And and of course, you know, Garrison receives these anonymous 36:55 letters and he then has to bring Chrisman in to testify and Chrisman said nothing. I mean, really nothing. And 37:02 then Garrison went on to tell the HSCA, “You got to look at this guy Chrisman. He’s he’s a he’s a real suspect uh in 37:10 the assassination.” And lo and behold, he’s not even in Garrison’s book. Yeah, he had a bee in his bonnet about 37:17 uh Chrisman for sure. Um well, he was as you know, he was in the original version 37:25 of uh Chrisman’s book. Yeah, he was he was in the original version of Garrison, 37:31 excuse me. Yeah, Garrison’s book, but was removed later. I talked to Larry Hapen about that um 37:40 when uh Garrison was uh writing that called his assassination memoir whatever 37:47 on the trail of the assassins. Yeah, you’re familiar with that title. Um he intended yeah to have a chapter on 37:54 Chrisman. I think the first publisher looked at I forget who this was now, but 38:00 they said, “You promised us a connection with the CIA and it’s just not here with 38:06 Chrisman. You know, it’s not working at all.” There you go. Yeah. And so Garrison 38:12 regrouped and he contacted Fred Nukem who was involved in that touchup photo 38:18 and said at that time the U House select committee assassinations had ended and 38:25 Garrison wasn’t happy with the work they did on Chrisman. He he it was his opinion he gave them a bunch of leads to 38:32 follow where they could have proved it but nothing uh they you know determined 38:37 that Chrisman had an alibi and I mean comparing him to the photos, I guess, of 38:43 the three tramps, I guess, of the million different people claimed were 38:49 the three tramps. I guess Chrisman maybe vaguely looked like the old man [ _ ] 38:54 but uh whatever the case, uh Nukem 39:00 suggested Larry Happen is the guy who really looked into Chrisman during that uh period in 6970. 39:07 and happened and got a hold of Garrison and said so many words you know you’re barking up 39:15 a tree there it’s going to undermine your book by using this information about Chrisman 39:22 because like I saidan had determined he’s the one who found out that Chrisman had an alibi he’s a uh 39:30 he was a teacher I forget he was might have been teaching high school at that time and was at some conference or 39:37 something and met up with uh one of the persons who worked with 39:44 Chrisman at where was he at? That might have been I think it was Reneer High School in Reneer, Oregon 39:53 who uh saw Chrisman there on the day of the assassination and they provided 39:59 written uh records to the House Select Committee on Assassination. So I mean 40:05 that so that was kind of a important piece of uh information 40:12 witnesses that Hannan brought uh forward that basically threw a wet towel over at 40:18 least Chrisman being in Daily Plaza on the day of the assassination. Of course that didn’t stop any of these theories 40:26 from growing since Chrisman died after the House Select Committee on Assassination. Man, 40:32 you can get online and punch in Chrisman and uh a lot of people are sold on the 40:37 theory that he was one of the three tramps. 40:43 Yeah. No, and you know, and it’s and it’s it’s it’s and I mean even Garrison was like, “Well, isn’t it amazing that 40:49 Chrisman was uh you know, living uh in Oregon and and and Fred Clay Shaw went 40:55 to uh Portland after San Francisco after the assassination. He must have they 41:00 must have crossed paths. That’s why he was going to Oregon to see Chrisman. And he’s writing this to the HSCA. I mean, 41:08 it’s just incredible. Hey, I’ve been to Portland many times, too. Yeah. I’ve been to Tacoma, Seattle. So, 41:17 yep. As I could be connected. So, yeah. No, a fascinating character. Looking forward to your book. I think 41:23 it’s going to be a really really uh really good book. And uh we’ll go into uh Chrisman in more detail when that 41:29 book comes out. Uh Beckham sure Beckham is another you know character who is associated with Chrisman who went on to 41:37 become not only a garrison suspect but Joan Melon’s key suspect in her book 41:42 Farewell to Justice. What can you say? Um boy where to start with Beckham. I mean he was a lifelong 41:48 conman. you’d done some good work on him as well. I have an extensive write up in 41:54 the book, but he was involved in one scam over another over the years. He was 42:00 like a lot of people associated with Chrisman. He had it used different aliases. Mark Evans was one as a uh 42:08 rockabilly and southern singer or sometimes a uh preacher of some sort. He 42:14 had all these different scams and like Chrisman and uh some of these other 42:20 folks they were uh connected to were involved in diploma mills of one type or 42:28 another. And somehow the two uh and Beckham was pretty young. He was in his 42:34 early 20s at the time he met Chrisman in 1966. Was a pretty accomplished conman 42:40 by that time. And uh during the fall, I 42:46 guess he got there supposedly in the spring of ‘ 66 through the fall, they started a bunch of dummy companies. One 42:53 of them was a course to teach law enforcement that cost uh $500, 43:01 you know, and the FBI got involved in breaking that up. They’re also involved 43:06 in a kind of a scam charity called the Northwest Relief Society that uh would 43:13 leave uh donation cans in different bars and stuff and the Olympia PD I think got 43:18 in and broke that up. And I think there might have been more serious stuff going on. There’s definitely allegations that 43:26 there was a stolen car ring and just a lot of shady stuff. But uh Beckham 43:33 basically split. This was his mo in the end of ‘ 66 and went to uh Omaha where 43:40 he started the same kind of shenanigans again. A lot he’d go and uh he’d start 43:46 like a uh thrift store which he’d also set up as a universal life church where 43:53 he could be a minister like in the basement and it would like a fly by night. He’d 44:00 be there for a uh few m few months or a few weeks uh allegations that he was 44:07 fencing stolen material. Then he’d move on to the next scam. My 44:15 my favorite Beckham scam is in the early 60s when he he promoted a Ricky Nelson 44:20 concert and and of course lo and behold he brings in a Ricky not the Ricky Nelson 44:26 but somebody else with the same name and well it might have been him it might have been him posing as ran off with the 44:33 money and he did the thing on a more serious level the same like I said the same mo in 76 where and this was in Alabama he 44:42 started collecting money for for a benefit for a couple of police officers that were killed for a country and music 44:49 show. He claimed that initially Ernest Tubs was going to be there with his group and but he got indicted for wire 44:58 fraud and whatever and he ended up u federal indictment being prosecuted by 45:06 uh Jeff Sessions, a future attorney general of these United States. But he 45:12 used he got off. who was acquitted and he used the claim that he was working for the CIA and so he was like doing a 45:21 lot of this stuff in the interest of national security. I don’t know but it was there was enough 45:28 reasonable doubts in the juror’s minds to uh get him uh acquitted. 45:34 He had started another things he was starting were these fake detective 45:40 agencies and once one he named this the central 45:46 intelligence alliance or something he used the initial CIA so he was kind of being 45:53 truthful that he had started he he’d worked for the CIA 45:59 but yeah quite a uh character but it was that time. Yeah. And so came out of that 46:07 uh trial that uh once again these rumors were surfacing again that he’d worked 46:14 for the CIA somehow involved with the Kennedy assassination. That’s 46:20 when the House Select Committee got started uh talking to him again during 46:25 that period when he was being uh prosecuted for that Alabama scam. He was 46:32 in jail in Pineluff and that the HSCA started talking to him there and 46:38 interviewed him a couple more times. Uh, and he told and and from what I 46:44 understand, he got immunity to talk to them. So he could say any damn thing he wanted to and and he was 46:52 always kind of working the scam seemed like over the years to create a this 46:59 false story that he could uh profit on about him being involved in the uh 47:05 Kennedy uh assassination as an unwitting kind of dupe who got sucked into the 47:11 thing and he was during the uh time he was being uh He was talking to the HSCA. 47:20 He was also shopping around a book which was I guess some version of which was 47:25 later published in the 2000s called the remnants of truth. Yeah, it’s definitely remnants of uh 47:33 truth. So yeah, it was something he’s always trying to uh I mean my my favorite is when he was 47:38 testifying before the HSCA, he was listing off all his degrees, a degree in 47:44 this, degree in that, all the universities, and he said, “I have more degrees than a thermometer.” 47:50 He actually he stole that from uh one of his earlier uh trials when he was uh in 47:59 I think it was when he was in Omaha. He got busted for a diploma mill 48:05 and the judge chastised him and that the district attorney there said, “Uh, yeah, 48:10 this man has more degrees than a thermometer.” And so Beckham loved that and he 48:17 started using it himself. And that’s what’s funny about that book of his remnants of truth. 48:23 And not a really a whole lot in there about the Kennedy assassination. I mean, there’s a few pages. There’s like a 48:31 dozen or more pages of all his diplomas. Yep. There’s personal testimonies from his 48:38 family members. It’s like, okay, it’s it’s a bizarre book. And and uh I I 48:44 mean, it’s just what a what a bizarre story. And I can’t believe that Joan Melon bought it. I mean I mean he 48:50 actually she was convinced that he had converted to Judaism. She has a picture picture of him in his 48:56 in in these re rabbitical robes, you know, in her book. And then she has some claims that he had some sort of military 49:03 document that he gave her that convinced her that he was, you know, involved in all this. And of course, you never see 49:08 the document. Yeah. That was similar in that same book. Um I believe it’s in the 49:14 introduction of the book. She also goes after Thornley claiming he was CIA and 49:19 that she saw a document that proved that. And I later I asked her at the 49:26 time and that was when did that book come out? 2005 or something or 49:32 emailed her asking if I could get a copy of that. So at the time I read that I go whoa that’s you know I took it kind of 49:39 half seriously. I’d like to see that document that proves I finally she never sent me the 49:46 document at the time. She said she was sick or something. and when she got better, she’d get it to me. And but I 49:53 pursued I emailed her a couple times, never heard back. I finally figured out what the document was. And you can see 50:00 it in a post that the story of Discordia uh called was Carrie Thornley, CIA. 50:08 And so, no, that document did not prove Thornley was CIA. You can go people want 50:15 more information, they can go read that. But yeah, there’s and so there’s also the document where she claims the 50:23 document was from Chrisman claiming that Beckham was part of this operation at a 50:30 place called the farm. I think secret military kind of clockwork orange place 50:36 where they were creating these military assassins. And so yeah, I never bothered 50:42 asking her. I’d like to see what the document sounds like. another phony thing that maybe who knows Chrisman 50:48 cooked up or who knows we’ve never seen it. Why don’t you show it, you know? 50:54 Yeah. Um, now he does uh Beckham uh he does uh have a 51:04 ministry there in uh where is that Kentucky or at least did 10 15 years ago 51:10 and an actual uh church chapel that was a former u synagogue I think 51:18 right and so he’s kind of a self-styled uh 51:23 dude [Laughter] Uh yeah. So I guess he can say whatever 51:30 he wants to say. He’s a minister of after some fashion, I guess. 51:36 Yeah. You know, I strongly recommend people go read his uh his testimony 51:41 before the Garrison Grand Jury. It is abs it’s absolutely hysterically funny 51:46 when you read because it just the way he lists off his degrees and and the way he 51:52 answers questions and and uh you know and he he actually was accusing Garrison 51:57 of homosexuality in his grand testimony. That was the big bombshell he dropped at 52:03 the end just Yeah. Um what I think he was uh doing 52:10 it’s uh that he was he was nervous of obviously of going back to New Orleans, 52:17 but I don’t think he was nervous about Kennedy assassination stuff. He still had some charges hanging over his head 52:25 for a number of uh things. There was that uh store that he and his brother 52:32 ripped off. They both worked in this uh clothing store and they stole a huge amount of uh the uh 52:40 merchandise there and were going to start their own stores. Once again, you look at the numbers, it was like $12,000 52:46 of merchandise. So, you’re talking in today’s numbers $100,000 worth of 52:52 stuff. So, that charge was still hanging over his head. his brother had uh 52:59 already uh served his time, but uh Beckham, as he was want to do, had been 53:06 able to skip out on I think uh it looked like he faked uh a suicide at that time, 53:12 went into a mental facility, then got out of there before he could face those 53:18 charges. So that those were still going on. And uh there was also the uh 53:23 statutory rape charge that had never really been adjudicated either. So he 53:29 had had these things going on. And if you look at his testimony, he kind of touches on on all that stuff and 53:36 provides alternative facts of what you actually happened that he wasn’t. So, I 53:43 think he was just trying to spin and cover for his past criminal 53:49 activities. If if you kind of read between the lines and a lot of that stuff and he never 53:55 he never really addresses questions. He just goes off on and then of course he he he ends up 54:03 telling the HSCA about his involvement in the assassination. They they realize it’s all ridiculous. But then years 54:09 later, Garrison believes, “Oh, there’s a confession tape, right?” Yeah. It’s it’s it’s Beckham. And Garrison’s all 54:16 excited. I’m I’ve been vindicated. There’s a confession tape, you know, and I was right all along. 54:22 And it was just was just it was just Beckham, you know. Well, Guy Russo has a uh good story 54:29 about the confession tape. Yeah. Gus Gus Russo. Yeah. You interview You interviewed him. Did 54:36 he talk about that? Okay. Yeah. Well, he basically he went to see Beckham in his office in uh I don’t know, Kentucky or 54:43 Omaha and Beckham is all these fake diplomas on the wall and and at some point uh he sort of says, “Yeah, it’s 54:49 all ridiculous. Let’s just play guitar and they end up guitar the the afternoon rather than talk about anything 54:55 serious.” Well, Russo has this story where he uh 55:01 he was working with Bernard Festerwald and uh going to the National Archives 55:08 looking for stuff. And this was like uh kind of after 55:13 during and after the House Select Committee on Assassinations. And at that time, all that was available 55:22 were like old FBI files and other stuff. the House Select Committee stuff had 55:28 been embargoed and um and part of that embargo came 55:35 from the Black Congressional Caucus really started the force that started those 55:42 hearings on the different assassinations and they uh were trying to keep a lid on 55:48 the U MLK materials just because of the hijinks of the FBI all 55:55 that they thought it would tarnish his image. You know, there’s all the wire taps of his 56:02 affairs, alleged affairs, and that type of stuff. So, that’s kind of the reason there was the embargo on those 56:07 materials. But, and has Gus told you this story before? No. No. Go ahead. No. 56:12 Okay. And so, he was going in there and u 56:19 looking for stuff. And one day he went into a little al cove where he found a 56:25 uh like a uh sheet that listed a bunch of uh stuff and he looked at the 56:31 numbers and it was related to the embargoed material. So he took he 56:37 grabbed whatever this was a uh sheet of paper that was somewhere in this alco 56:42 took it back to his desk and started writing down all these he rec it didn’t say the house select committee and 56:49 assassinations he just recognized the series of numbers he goes whoa that’s 56:54 interesting that’s all the embargoed material 56:59 and there’s a a list of everything one of the stuff on there was confession tape da da Huh? So what he did, he 57:08 thought maybe I can do something with this list. Um he thought 57:16 during certain times like during lunch uh breaks and uh maybe on weekends there 57:23 was more inexperienced staff there uh students uh and people maybe not quite 57:31 uh as swift on the uptake as the regular archivist who manages. I’ll take some of 57:38 those numbers to them and see what they bring back to me. And sure enough, they brought back to him some of these 57:44 embargoed materials. Uh, a lot of them were these cassette tapes, 57:50 right? Yeah. And so he So he’s kind of freaking out here. Whoa. 57:56 He goes back and one of them, I’m not sure if he ever actually listened to the 58:01 uh Beckham tape, but he started listening to these tapes on the 58:07 equipment there. And the archives would uh supply you 58:12 with a tape player and a duplicate thing where you could make copies. So that was the plan. he was going to come in there 58:19 during lunchtime, start getting these embargoed classified materials basically 58:27 and uh but he it it was going to take a long time and so uh Fster said, “Well, 58:35 maybe we can get some machine where you can high do a high-speed dubbing.” and they got a hold of this big clanky 58:43 huge machine that he was somehow able to get into the archives and started uh 58:49 burning multiple copies at high speed and got busted by somebody caught him 58:56 there. They would first they caught him with you can’t use that high-speed machines. You’re going to break the damn 59:01 tapes. Oh, okay. Well, they and he got clearance from the people at who are 59:07 working during lunchtime. But this is one of the regular archists and he so you got to stop that right now. You 59:13 can’t use them. The archives started walking away. He turned back and saw it was the embargoed material and he just 59:19 flipped out, you know, and took all the material and u re so hight tailed it out of there 59:26 and went back home to Maryland or where it was that weekend uh expecting the FBI 59:31 to raid him, but nothing ever came of it. Uh, and you could, you should ask 59:37 Gus. He has a write up of this. It’s like a dozen pages of this whole uh, 59:43 experience. But that’s when he first heard about that uh, confession confession tape which led him to doing 59:51 some research on Beckham and like you said uh, going to his storefront and 59:57 guess he was in Kentucky at that time and figuring out Yeah. that he was just a uh good humored kind of con man. And 1:00:06 they ended up jamming on guitars and singing uh that night. 1:00:12 Yeah. It’s it’s it’s I mean it’s just I mean I could I could I could just sense how excited Garrison was to believe that 1:00:20 he was finally being vindicated, you know, by by Thomas Beckham. I mean it’s just so funny. Well, there 1:00:28 yeah, there had been these rumors about the uh confession tape and Garrison heard about it. Different stappers was 1:00:35 saying there’s a con uh confession and so that was spreading through the you 1:00:42 know JFK research community at that time. It was the hot hot thing. 1:00:47 Beckham’s confession tape which confessed to all number of things. Yeah. and 1:00:54 implicated dozens of different people, you know, that had uh materialized 1:01:01 during the Garrison investigation. I mean, Beckham connected them all or 1:01:08 claimed that, you know, they were all connected. Oswald, Ruby, 1:01:13 uh, Banister, etc., etc. Yeah, he loved to drop names. I mean, 1:01:19 he’s just absolutely incredible. And uh what a what a character. I mean just 1:01:24 really funny. I mean if I if you again if you read his testimony either the HSCA or Garrison’s grand jury, you can’t 1:01:30 help but laugh when you read it. I mean it’s actually quite funny when you read it. I don’t know. I just don’t know how Garrison 1:01:36 could have taken him seriously um after that. But he did. Of course another name is not in Garrison’s book. 1:01:43 He left Beckham out of his book as well. That is true. Yeah. 1:01:48 I wonder why. Yeah. But like I said, Joan Millan ran with it and gave him his story and other 1:01:56 shot in the arm. Yep. And and yeah, and she she bought a hook, line, and sinker, including the 1:02:01 fact that he even converted to Judaism, which was absolutely hysterical. And it was his own branch of Judaism, 1:02:08 right? It was his own special branch, you know. I don’t know. I don’t know what the heck it is, but he wears a yarmaka. And uh I 1:02:14 think I think uh he might have some uh 1:02:19 family ties are Jewish to Judaism, but it’s Yeah, it’s pretty 1:02:25 Well, he changed he sort of changed his name for a while. So it was like B apostrophe E C E sound like it was a a 1:02:33 Jewish name. Yeah. Yep. You can’t make this stuff up. 1:02:40 Okay. So tell me what’s next? You’re writing a book on Chrisman. Tell us about your your upcoming book and where you’re going to go from there. 1:02:47 Yeah, it’s about it’s almost done. Like I mentioned, I uh interviewed Fred 1:02:52 Chrisman Jr. which was interesting getting uh hold of him and he’s been really uh 1:02:59 helpful in the endeavor and other people I mentioned like Larry Hapan and uh 1:03:04 Hannon, that’s how you say it. Yeah. Larry happening and uh number of other people. It it’s 1:03:12 been going on for numbers years. It was kind of like the uh Thornley book where just out of an 1:03:19 interest I’d gathered material on Thornley and you know after a while you 1:03:24 just have so much stuff and written articles related to Charisman. It got to 1:03:30 a point, well, maybe this is a book. And yeah, I’ve learned 1:03:35 quite a bit over time to really expand on, you know, what’s out there already. 1:03:42 Well, I can’t wait till it comes out and we’ll have you back on to uh discuss the book when the book is published. Uh it’s 1:03:49 it’s definitely a needed book and uh your stuff is absolutely magnificent. So, uh, u, we’ll put links into your 1:03:56 books in the description of the of the podcast and, uh, I strongly recommend everybody go and buy Adam Goritley’s 1:04:02 books. They’re just terrific. Yeah. And check out Historia Discordia that has some of JFK assassination 1:04:09 stuff, but lot of good stuff. A lot of stuff on these characters are are on online on 1:04:15 your website. Very important stuff with documents, photographs, um, etc. A lot of good primary material. Yeah, I got 1:04:22 pretty obsessive for a while with some of those posts there. I look back at them now, it’s like, good lord, 10,000 1:04:30 words in a blog post. The hell’s wrong with you? Yeah, it’s too much. 1:04:37 Okay. Well, thank you very much and uh we’ll be back in touch uh sometime next year. 1:04:42 Okay, sounds good. Thanks,
Technical Notes:
This was originally shot as a 1280 by 720 ZOOM Call. I edited the first few shots using Adobe After Effects (“detail Preserving Upscale” with the rest edited with Adobe Premiere and it’s basic scaling feature. ( I think I over did the extreme close up on the guests face.)
I downloaded several book covers from AMAZON and other websites. Then I cut them up and layered them in Adobe Photoshop. Then I animated them into motion graphics pieces in Adobe After Effects.
One of the animated book covers has some 2d animation made with Adobe Animate (formerly Flash. The Masonic “33” and the spinning Atomic symbol were made with Animate:
On The Trail of Delusion, Episode 23, Daniel Evans
Lifelong JFK Assassination researcher and Dallas area Tour guide Dan Evans tells Fred Litwin about his journey into JFKA obsession and what he tells visitors what he thinks about Conspiracy Theories.
Countdown to Dallas, Episode 5, Was the Parade Route changed?
One claim of conspiracy theorists is that the motorcade route was deliberately moved to ensure that the Presidents car went down Elm street (underneath the depository) instead of Main Street
Here, as you can see, that is not possible, because of the concrete abuttment between the two streets
This is Main Street here,. Over here is Elm Street
Today, as in 1963, it is physically impossible to do that.
The only way to get to Stemmons freeway to the Trade Mart again was to go down Elm Street.
And now you know the rest of the story.
More stories on the assassination, and the events leading up to it,
in my latest book,
Countdown to Dallas,
Available everywhere books are sold.
There is also a Countdown to Dallas Podcast produced by Evergreen Podcasting that is also available everywhere
One claim that conspiracists often make about the Kennedy Assassination is that a second person was spotted on the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository minutes before the shooting proof, they claim, of a conspiracy
I’m Paul Brandus, author of Countdown to Dallas, and just minutes before the shooting there was indeed a second person on the sixth floor just steps from Lee Harvey Oswald and his sniper’s perch.
but this does not mean there was a conspiracy
Here now the rest of the story:
Around 5 minutes to 12 the Kennedy motorcade was underway headed for downtown Dallas.
At the depository, employees excited that the President would soon pass by, knocked off early for lunch.
as he was heading downstairs one employee Bonnie Ray Williams said he saw Oswald
at the depository employees excited that the president would soon pass by knocked off early for lunch as he was heading downstairs one employee Bonnie Ray Williams said he saw Oswald on the fifth or sixth floor he wasn’t sure which but moments later another employee Charles Given went to the sixth floor to get his cigarettes there he saw Oswald they had a brief conversation
Given said “Aren’t you going downstairs it’s near lunchtime.” Oswald “No sir.” Given left now minutes after that brief encounter Bonnie Ray Williams also returned to the sixth floor “why?” “To watch the presidential motorcade.”
At the time everyone was talking like they was going to watch from the sixth floor Williams testified and while he waited for his buddies Williams ate his lunch a chicken sandwich and bottle of Dr pepper he remembers sitting in front of the third or fourth window Williams recalled quote “I couldn’t see too much of the sixth floor because the books at this time were stacked so high if there was anyone else up there on the sixth floor,” Williams neither saw nor heard anyone now here’s where it gets interesting down on Houston Street a young man Arnold Roland was standing with his wife Barbara looking around his eyes drifted up to the sixth floor of the depository there in the corner window he saw a man holding a rifle with a telescopic site roland assumed that this was a Secret Service agent there to protect the president so it never occurred to him to point this man out to a nearby police officer but Oswald was not the only person Roland saw on the sixth floor his wandering eye also saw what he described as ” a colored man a few windows away” this was Bonnie Ray Williams eating his lunch now the other guys that he was going to watch the parade with James Garman and Harold Norman were their names had earlier been down on the sidewalk but decided the view would be better from the fifth floor of the depository why the fifth floor? because the sixth floor here shown that day was a jungle of boxes by now as Garman recalled it’s between 12:20 and 12:25 just minutes before the assassination they were soon joined by Williams who had finished his lunch leaving this greasy bag and empty soda bottle near the window bonnie Ray Williams had been so close to Oswald while he ate that police and the media later thought the garbage had been Oswald’s a month after the assassination this book published by United Press International and American Heritage repeated this mistake writing in the caption quote “The sniper had dined on fried chicken and pop while waiting patiently to shoot the president.” One report said “Wrong.” But it does show just how close how tantalizingly close Bonnie Ray Williams sat to the man who was about to murder the president this proximity helps explain why two other men on the street here at the southwest corner of Houston and Elm saw Oswald sitting perfectly still their names Bob Edwards and Ronald Fiser moments before the motorcade appeared Edwards spotting Oswald told Fiser quote “Look at that guy there in that window he looks like he’s uncomfortable.” Were words to that effect fischer chimed in quote “This man held my attention for 10 or 15 seconds all the time I watched him he never moved his head he never moved anything just was there transfixed he looked to be 22 or 24 years old.” It’s likely that Oswald who was 24 never moved because Bonnie Ray Williams as we’ve established was just feet away eating his lunch meanwhile Oswald was also seen by yet another man who sat here tantalizingly close to the window his name was Howard Brennan here’s Brennan at that spot in a recreation of November 22nd he saw Oswald in the sixth floor window right above James Gar Harold Norman and Bonnie Ray Williams who had by now joined his buddies on the fifth floor “I saw this man on the sixth floor,” Brennan later testified he added “There was no other person on that floor that ever came to the window that I noticed there were people on the next floor down which is the fifth floor colored guys.” The time frame here is about 12:22 which lines up with the Williams testimony Brennan could give exact times because from his vantage point he could see the big clock the famous Hertz sign that in 1963 stood on the roof of the depository now let’s go back to Ronald Fiser about 30 seconds before the shooting 30 seconds fischer looked up again an affidavit he gave to Dallas police that very day said “I looked up at the window and noticed that he seemed to be laying down or in a funny position anyway because all I could see was his head.” When the presidential car turned left onto Elm Street there was but one person on the sixth floor here in the southeast corner window not two as some conspirators have alleged and now you know the rest of the story more stories on the assassination and the events leading up to it in my latest book Countdown to Dallas available everywhere books are sold there’s also a Countdown to Dallas podcast produced by Evergreen Podcasting that is also available everywhere
The President’s car is now turning on to Elm Street and it will be only a matter of minutes before he arrives at the trademark
[Music] On October 14th, 1963 Lee Harvey Oswald applied and got a job at a place called the Texas School Book Depository
Here’s how it looked at the time A nondescript red brick building perched on the southeast corner of Houston and Elm Streets It offered a magnificent view of a place called Daily Plaza. Here’s the building today Now the question of just how Oswald got the job just 5 weeks before President Kennedy’s motorcade drove right by has been a longstanding question for those studying the assassination Some think it’s fishy Surely they say proof of a conspiracy I’m Paul Brandus a longtime White House-based journalist speaker at seven presidential libraries My latest is Countdown to Dallas. In Countdown to Dallas I tell the rest of the story about Oswald and the depository And for one surprising twist you might not know about stick around to the end of this short video That mid-October 1963 story starts here in the Dallas suburb of Irving where Oswald’s wife Marina and their 21-month-old daughter June were living with a woman named Ruth Payne. Marina was also days away from giving birth to her second daughter Marina the young Soviet
Immigrants a woman she met through the local immigrants
Marina was the victim of spousal abuse Lee was a wifebeater hitting Marina on a regular basis Ruth who wanted to improve her Russian took Marina in
That’s the backdrop Oswald living on his own was also unemployed He had just gotten back from Mexico City after a futile effort to get a visa to travel to Cuba He needed a job badly On the 14th Ruth Marina and some other women in the neighborhood were having coffee and the subject of Lee’s unemployment came up Oswald had several job prospects One was at a bakery the other driving a truck but Lee didn’t know how to drive One woman at that coffee Lenny May Randall mentioned that her brother Wesley Bule Frasier had just gotten a job at the Depository in downtown Dallas She thought they might need an extra man Now Marina Oswald’s English was poor Lee did not allow her to learn it So Ruth Payne called the depository and spoke with a boss there His name Roy Truly Truly said yes he could use another man to fill orders for school books Tell Oswald to come down and apply Now you have to remember what a pathetic work record Oswald had. He’d been fired from two jobs in just the past 6 months And a potential third employer checked on a reference who said Oswald was not a good employee Oswald was unwanted His skills were minimal but a menial job filling boxes with books Oswald filled out this job application His address was a lie Said he’d lived in Dallas continuously That was a lie he had just gotten out of the Marines and was honorably discharged Two more lies that he had been on his last job for three years Another lie Five lies on one page It’s a reflection of Lee Harvey Oswald’s habit of lying about well just about everything But unlike other potential employers Roy Truly did not check on any of this It was just a menial job after all So Oswald lucked out So that’s how Oswald got his job at the Depository A group of suburban women having coffee lacking the skills to work in a bakery or drive a truck having poor references that might have resulted in work elsewhere on and on It took a series of small things for this job to work out Now I mentioned one final twist to this story that may surprise you I’ll get to that in a second But it’s also important to remember this When Oswald got the job President Kennedy’s visit to Texas had not been finalized A trip had been announced but the final decision on Dallas would not be made until a month later November 14th when the location for Kennedy speech at the Trademart was set That decision that location was made by none other than Ken O’Donnell the president’s top White House aid The Secret Service had recommended other locations Other parts of town which would have meant different motorcade routes Conspiracy theorists who are sure that Oswald’s job was some kind of setup that he was somehow placed in the depository can never explain how all of these little things unconnected ranging from suburban women having coffee to President Kennedy’s own right-hand man picking that final location occurred And here’s the final twist to this story You might not know that in 1963 the Texas School Book Depository had another location at 1917 North Houston Street. Roy Truly the boss nearly assigned Oswald to that location. Had he done so Lee Harvey Oswald would have been nowhere near Dealey Plaza on the day of the president’s visit. Great tragedies often take a series of small and seemingly unconnected events to occur This was one of them There are other stories to tell about Oswald his life that very different era decades of presidential security and the attitude of numerous presidents towards it And also the science of cognitive dissonance why humans are wired to think and process information and data the way they do and why this fuels the beliefs that so many people have in assorted conspiracy theories Not just the Kennedy assassination but everything from Pearl Harbor to the moon landing to 9/11 even Princess Diana’s car crash The science behind our beliefs that’s also explored All of this and much more can be found in my latest book Countdown to Dallas and in a podcast of the same name Both are available everywhere
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
Wagner is unique in that while he is on the Lone Gunman side, he disagrees with the single bullet theory.
Episode 3, Gerald “Case Closed” Posner
Uploaded in 1920 by 1080 on May 10, 2024.
Episode 4, Dr Martin J Kelly, Jr. Uploaded Jun 9, 2024.
Episode 5, Steve Roe on the General Walker Shooting. Uploaded Jul 2, 2024.
Roe wrote a chapter on Gayle Nix Jacksons “Pieces of the Puzzle” and is writing a book General Edwin Walker.
This is (so far) the best episode from the point of view of production values and camera work. The subject lives near me. So instead of this episode just being a ZOOM call, I shot the conversation with my “real” cameras. I even brought along my drone ( even though there was no logical need for it, I just wanted to use my drone).
Also, I had a lot of documentary footage of Fred Litwin and Steve Roe visiting some JFK related sites in Dallas, and of Roes visit to General Walkers grave outside of Kerr, Texas. (Center Point Cemetery, Center Point, Kerr County, Texas, USA)
Dallas author Dave Perry discusses how he used his experience as an insurance fraud investigator to re-examine and de-bunk many conspiracy stories related to the Kennedy assassination and the supposed “mysterious deaths.”
Scientist Nick Nalli discusses the science and physics of the Kennedy Assassination. He analyzes the science behind the single bullet theory, the “back and to the left” head snap, and the physics of other issues.
This combines a ZOOM Call and some documentary footage I shot of Fred Litwin in New Orleans.
Episode 10, Don Carpenter. Uploaded Jan 23, 2025.
Don Carpenter discusses his book “Man of a Million Fragments: The True Story of Clay Shaw” Clay Shaw was falsely accused by New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison of conspiracy to assassinate President John F. Kennedy.
I took the pre-existing book cover and cut it into layers in Adobe Photoshop and animated them in Adobe After Effects.
Episode 11, Bill Brown on J D Tippit.
Lifelong JFK researcher Bill Brown discusses the murder of Dallas Police Officer J. D. Tippit by Lee Harvey Oswald as he (Oswald) tried to evade capture for the assassination of President John F. Kennedy on November 22, 2025. Bill Brown has devoured every major book and document of the Tippit case, has visited Tenth and Patton and the other major Kennedy assassination sites many times and has an encyclopedic knowledge of the case.
You can discuss the Tippet case with Bill Brown at the FaceBook group:
This special episode of “On the Trail of Delusion” includes never before seen aerial drone and ground footage of the Tippit death scene in Oak Cliff (Dallas) and newly created 2D animations illustrating the placement of the people involved.
I shot this footage and created the animations to be used in my upcoming documentary ” The Grassy No” and I thought I’d use it here.
Episode 12, Eric Dezenhall, Wiseguys and the White House
Fred Litwin interviews Eric Dezenhall, author of “Wiseguys and the White House.”
The book is about the Mafia/organized crime connections some Presidents had. He also discusses his experience as a public relations consultant to big corporations led him to believe that the James Bond style “fixers” and hitmen we see in many movies don’t exist.
Episode 13, Dr Nick Nalli on the Acoustics Evidence and the Zapruder Film
Dr Nick Nalli returns to discuss the acoustics evidence as well as the Zapruder Film.
Episode 14, Scott Maudsley on Oswald’s Antisocial Personality Disorder. Uploaded Feb 27, 2025.
Fred Litwin and Scott Maudsley discuss Presidential assassin Lee Harvey Oswald’s (alleged) Antisocial Personality Disorder, Narcissism and other possible psychological disorders. They also discuss the books ” Inside The Criminal Mind,” by Stanton Samenow, “Marina and Lee” by Priscilla Johnson McMillan, “Oswalds Game” by by Jean Davison, “Reclaiming History” by Vincent Bugliosi, “Case Closed” by Gerald Posner, “Mrs. Paine’s Garage” by Thomas Mallon, and several others.
Scott Maudsley’s own video on the subject:
I had nothing to do with the creation of that video.)
The first episode of this series discussed what might be in the JFK files IF they ever get released. Upon his return he discusses what IS in them after President Trump released them.
mattkprovideo 