Tag Archives: #litwin

Free to disagree on the word “cult”

www.mattkprovideo.com/2025/12/05/free-to-disagree-on-the-word-cult/

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.

You are free to disagree.

CIA Disinfo Videos

http://www.mattkprovideo.com/2025/11/27/cia-disinfo-videos/

Episode 1, Abe Zapruder:

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.

Fred Litwin’s’ blog and links to his books:

www.onthetrailofdelusion.com

Fred Litwin is not really a Central Intelligence Agency Disinformation agent.

Fred Litwin is not really a Central Intelligence Agency employee at all.

At least I don’t think he is. Or maybe that’s just what THEY want us to think!

Episode 6:

Episode 7:

Delusion, Ep. 24, Dale K. Myers

www.mattkprovideo.com/2025/10/11/delusion-ep-24-dale-k-myers/

Episode 24 of Fred Litwin’s YouTube show, “On The Trail of Delusion.”

A conversation with Dale K. Myers, author of “WITH MALICE” on the assassinations of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy and Dallas Police Officer J. D. Tippit.

Websites about Dale K. Myers:

https://www.jfkfiles.com/

https://www.oakcliffpress.com/

https://www.jdtippit.com/

TRANSCRIPT:

Intro:

I want to thank everybody for coming this afternoon. My name is Fred Litwin.

Noted author Fred Litwin and of course Fred is also the author of

I was a Teenage JFK Conspiracy Freak, On the Trail of Delusion and Oliver Stone’s film Flam the demagogue of  Dealey Plaza.

Fred Litwin is here. He’s a longtime author and certainly watcher of politics.

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

[Music]

Okay, welcome to another edition of On the Trail of Delusion, where I try to separate the wheat from the chaff and try to give you something substantial on the JFK assassination rather than the usual grl you’ll find on the internet and on YouTube. And today my guest is Dale Myers. Dale Myers is a 50-year veteran of radio and television. He’s the winner of numerous awards for his work in the broadcast industry, including four Emmy awards for his computer animation work. Dale is a recognized expert on the JFK assassination. And over the last two decades, maybe three decades, he has served as an on camera expert and technical consultant for numerous television channels, including ABC News, the BBC, PBS, the Discovery Channel, and the History Channel.
So, welcome Dale Myers.
Hello, Fred. How are you?
Good. How are you?
I am excellent.
So, my first question is, you know, how did you get started in in researching the JFK assassination?
Kind of a strange thing. in 1975 I had my first radio job up in Cadillac, Michigan.
Actually in the next couple of days will be the 50th anniversary of KISS coming to Cadillac, Michigan.
So there’s a whole hoopla going on up there about that. But it was shortly after their visit. So actually probably in early 1976, one of the high schoolers came up and said, “Hey, our teacher showed us the Zapruder film.”

They had a bootleg copy.

And as you probably know, it hadn’t it had aired on national television, I believe in March of 75, but I hadn’t seen it. And I was anxious to see what it looked like. I said, “Well, can you get the address of where he got this bootleg Super Eight film?” And of course, it was Penn Jones that was selling these.

So, I ordered one. And when I got it, I thought, “Wow.” Of course, you see the head go back and you’re thinking, “Wow, that that looked like from the front or something.” So, I I wanted to learn more about it. I went to the local Cadillac library and I was looking for any book on the Kennedy assassination, specifically one that maybe talked about the Zapruder film and I found one on the on the shelf.

It was called 6 seconds in Dallas by Josiah Thompson, as people will recognize. And so I took that and I read that. I thought, “Wow, there’s a lot more to this than I ever thought.” And so I went back and got another book and another book and as you know, you’re off and running. Yeah. So uh you know it took me I think about two and a half to three years at at that time to crawl through the books and the magazines and the newspaper articles that were available.

Of course there was no internet.

So newspaper articles and magazine would be like in the vertical file they used to call that at the library. So, you know, after exhausting all of those, uh, someone uh, I wrote a letter. I was interested in the the visual stuff and, uh, I heard about the DCA film, which was a collection of 8 millimeter films of the motorcade.

I think I wrote to the National Archives. Marian Johnson was the curator at the time, and I expressed interest in anything they had on the DCA film. Well, they sent me uh an FBI document which listed the names and addresses of those members that were part of that uh association and they also sent it to an a guy out in Iowa. And so he ended up writing me a letter, hey, I I understand you’re interested in the DCA film. So again, this is before the internet, so this was the only way you really hooked up with other people. He then started send he had a vast collection of 8×10 black and whites. he would send me spares that he had. And so my collection began to grow and of course my interest and uh I ended up calling uh the secretary of the DCA and I was inquiring about whether there was still a copy around. As it turned out, he had his own personal copy. He was willing to sell me for 25 bucks. So I bought it and uh you know that’s how I kind of got started and eventually I really got an interest in the tippet shooting because of largely because of Mark Lane’s book. Uh he had written the most on the shooting up to that point that had been in print. I think he wrote his chapter was 14 pages long. Usually it was a couple of sentences or a few paragraphs in other books but he had the most uh that I had read about it. expressed an interest in that and I began to order stuff from the National Archives and you know I was working as a dish jockey they didn’t pay a squat so I had very few dollars to spend you know that was spare so to speak so I actually devised a plan I found this recently a list I would order two 8 by10s and they were like six six and a quarter at the time uh each and so I laid out a plan there was like 50 or 60 that I wanted I couldn’t afford to buy them all at the same time. So I would order like one or two like every month and then they would start coming in six months down the road they start coming in and then I’m I’m kind of leapfrogging. So it took about two or three years to acquire what in essence were the Warrant Commission exhibits on the tippet shooting. But uh you know I was kind of off and running at that point. So what what what you know I think you initially you believed there was a conspiracy but what what’s tell us a bit about your journey from into believing that Oswald was the lone gunman. Well I I tell people I I went the long way around the barn so to speak. Um and I also tell people that you know 90% of what’s written out there is conspiracy oriented. So you can’t if you’re reading the books out there you can’t help but walk away thinking there’s a conspiracy. And I certainly did. I mean, they read Sylvia Mar’s book uh on the tippet shooting, Mark Lanes, of course, I mentioned and you know, and then of course you had Josiah Thompson talking about the shooting in De Plaza. But, you know, yeah, I couldn’t help but think that there had to have been a conspiracy. And uh and so at at one point I started to focus on the tippet shooting because that seemed the easiest to be able to prove. You know, what I’m reading is, oh, he Oswalt’s frame for the tippet shooting. This is all designed to show he had a capacity for violence and therefore they could really hang the assassination on him as well. So I thought, well, if if it’s a frame up, and if it’s the obvious frame up that Mark Lane and the others are talking about, this should be it should be a cakewalk, right? So in Mark Lane’s book, as you know, he had he was one of the few books that had footnotes and he had the documents on the tippet shooting that he was referencing. So just like the photographs, I ordered all the documents from Marian Johnson at the National Archives and you know 6 months later you know you get the documents and I was shocked to be honest that what he had referenced was not only was it not true most of it wasn’t even in the context. So he’d take things out of context or he just flat out lied about it. And I guess the thing, you know, being naive at the time, I used to think that when a publisher published a book, they didn’t publish lies. They had to be facts. I mean, right? The publisher is not going to just publish lies. People would get sued, wouldn’t they? Well, apparently that’s not true. So, uh, one thing I did learn is I never bought a book after that that didn’t have footnotes and reference notes because, you know, and you know, there was a lot of books that came out, the the fast paperbacks that there was no reference notes or anything. There was no way to check what they were saying. So, uh, I was really uh, dismayed at the fact that, uh, Lane had basically lied in his book, Rush to Judgment, in particular about the tippet shooting. I mean, you can go through a lot of the other stuff, but in particular, I I got well verssed on the tippet shooting stuff. With my eyes kind of open, I started to use my uh role at the radio station to be able to open the door that might not have been open to other people. So, years ago, Fred, um before I got into the Kennedy assassination, when I was like, you know, 13, 8th grade or so, I really got a fascination with the Lincoln assassination. Now, not that I’m fascinated by assassinations, but this is just the journey I was on. And there was a book that was out, big picture book called 20 days. And uh I was just always fascinated by the Lincoln assassination, the conspiracy, and just really the crime itself, the the technical aspects of it. And I re I started researching that and I realized, wow, this happened like 150 years ago. I mean, everybody there’s nobody to talk to. They’re all dead. And it was sort of in the back of my mind that when I got into the Kennedy assassination, I thought, you know, here’s where you can make a difference because this is only when I started, it’s only 15 years earlier. And I thought a lot of these people are still alive, you know, and uh again, this is before the internet. So I would go like, let’s say I’m looking for John Smith or in the case of the tippet shooting, Bill Smith. Now you can imagine Smith is a last name and Bill pretty common name. There’s a lot of Bill Smiths in the Dallas area and there’s there was no reason for me to think that he still lived there but you know he had to start somewhere. So I would go to the white pages the telephone book right at the library and I would copy the three or four pages of Bill Smith’s. I would go home and it was like dialing for dollars. I would just start and are you the Bill Smith who used to let no and they’d hang you know whatever they’d hang up and I’d move on. So, I had these huge phone bills at the time, like $3 400 when they should be like 50 bucks. And uh but I would hit pay dirt. I would hit some of these guys. So, I would call from the radio station and it would enable me to feed the phone line through a tape recorder and I would roll tape on all these and make a transcript. And I got pretty good at at doing those. Now what was happening at the time this was 1983 and so I uh the 25th anniversary was coming up and I thought this’d be kind of cool to take these recordings and turn this into kind of a radio documentary kind of theater of the mind. I could play some actualities from the time period which I had begun to collect and then I had these interviews that were kind of exclusive. So and it was going to be on the whole case not just the tippet shooting. So, I would call with that as being sort of the the reason for the call. Listen, the 20th anniversary is coming up. I’d like to talk to you about the assassination. When I got when I talked to police officers, a lot of them were hung up would hang up on me because they’d been burned in the past. Yeah. You know, I wasn’t the first guy to call some of these people. And a lot of these guys were abused by the people that would call them. But occasionally, you would hit a good one. One of them being Jim Lavell was probably the nicest guy in the world. Yep. and he was very open. And the thing with Jim was is if he liked you and he gave you his stamp of approval, he would then open the door. He would vouch for you. So the other cops would then talk to you that you might not otherwise get. So I did uh like 25 or 30 interviews in that 1983 period. most of them with police and eyewitnesses that had not been interviewed before that nobody had ever heard of or had not given testimony to the warrant commission or in like Nick McDonald’s case had given testimony but Nick had been raped over the coals about the mysterious guy that fingered the guy in the back right in the front row there was mysterious guy at least that’s how it was written up turned out of course it was Johnny Brewer who he’s referring to but I could call these guys and ask them the questions that had been asked and left unanswered in all these right books that I’ve been reading. So, it kind of gave me a leg up to to do it that way. So, and I did do the radio documentary. It aired uh in Michigan. It was uh my the news director of the station I was working for uh had it sent to the AP for the AP awards. It actually won an honorable mention. Oh, nice. and and the judges did say it was the best radio documentary on that subject that they had ever heard. So, it was very encouraging to be able to do those kinds of things. Well, yeah, it’s a good thing you did. And I thank God you you found all those witnesses. I have to sort of stop for a bit of a commercial and basically show people the fact that this this book second edition of your book with malice is is just unbelievable and this belongs in everybody’s bookshelf. I mean it’s an incredible book. It is the ultimate guide to the tippet shooting, but also it’s more than that because it gives you a little bit of insight into conspiracy thinking and how to debunk things and what the truth is and uh full of pictures and also it humanizes JD Tippet. He’s not just a a name, somebody who was murdered. He was a a man, a husband, a father, um a real person and and a family who really deeply loved him. And you get a sense of the man in this book and that’s fantastic. Well, thank you. And you know, I got to say that the original version was the uh the kind of burnt orange uh cover in ’98 actually led me to meet the Tippet family, which allowed me to get the inside story about him and then update the book for the version that you just showed, the 2013 edition. And I was very happy to do it for them really because they, you know, I bought your book three times. I bought the first edition, the second edition, and the Kindle edition. Oh, well, thank you very much. And they’re all, you know, the Kindle is the only one still out there, and they’re they’re basically out of print. The you never see the blue one on eBay. I’ve noticed that. And and of course, there were far fewer copies of that that were actually printed. I printed 3,000 of the first edition, 500 of the 2013 edition, and it was really only done because I wanted JD’s sister Joyce to see her brother’s story in print, the the, you know, the family part of the story. So, what had happened is when the 98 book came out, at that time on Amazon, when you made a comment, they actually would include your email address. They don’t do that anymore. and uh uh one of the nieces of JD Tippet commented finally the true story about my uncle and had her email address and so I contacted her and we ended up talking on the phone that led to an interview with her and her sister which then you know they were kind of you know feeling me out and vouching for and then they brought in their parents which was Jad’s uh older sister and his uh his brother-in-law who he had known since they were 16. and they lived right next door on the farms. And uh and then they led me to Joyce, the the younger sister, the brothers. When I say I met the Tippet family, I don’t mean Marie and her children, although I did meet them, right? But she didn’t want to do an interview. And um largely because of something that had been written in the first edition of the book. And even though the the family went to bat for me and tried to get her to do an interview, she refused to do one. And I understood. But as it turned out, I ended up interviewing, you know, his a lot of his cousins, his close friends, people that you would have never uh gotten the story from. And I really think that I ended up getting much more than I would have had I just interviewed Marie. Right. Right. even though I would have loved to have done it. Um I did get a lot of the the backstory from other perspectives. So that was all good. And then uh when the 2013 anniversary was coming up, I thought, you know, I she really Joyce really wanted in the and Christine really wanted to have this part. They said, gosh, it’s too bad that this part of the story is family story wasn’t in the first edition. I said, well, I could do another edition. And so I did basically for them. And so that’s the second edition. And I I’ll tell you what, Fred, if I if I got nothing out of doing either book, meeting them and becoming very close friends and still friends with the family. Worth it. Absolutely worth it for sure. Um, and it’s it’s a fantastic section. You have a lot of pictures as well. So it’s it’s really really terrific. And and I think one of the saddest things to me about the JFK assassinations is that people is is sort of the victims. There’s so many victims of the conspiracy idiots out there. People well like the Tippet family where you have JD Tippet accused of being involved in the assassination. I mean this is this is just such shameful behavior by the conspiracy community. Yeah. And uh unfortunately some of the early conspiracy types approached the family and you know they told me later we we wanted to talk about JD. We wanted to talk about our brother but these people would turn on us. One in particular a very well-known researcher and uh I don’t remember if I mentioned who it is in the book but everybody would know who it is. Yeah. He actually went to her house. She o opened the door. Open arms. Come on. See, he he was over there for two or three days and uh toward the end he said, “So tell me the truth now.” And she was appalled and they got into an argument and her husband come out and threw this guy out of the house. He had managed to she gave one of the the smiling photo. We’ve seen the smiling photo of JD taken in ‘ 61, which is actually a a closeup of his face from a much larger photograph. She gave that to him because that was uh when he was when he was killed, they really the family didn’t have that many photos. And so this was one they thought really represented him smiling. That’s the way they remember him. And then of course there was that police uniform photo from 1957. So those two photos sort of hit the market, but the smiling photo was later. So it wasn’t one of the Warren Commission exhibits. The Warren Commission used his 1952 ID photo when he joined the force and then that 57 photo of him in with the police cap on the uniform. And then the smiling photo came out later because this researcher got it from Joyce and he put it out there. And of course uh she was appalled at his uh you know what he had done. And then I found out in interviewing Murray Jackson, the same guy did the same thing to him. befriended Murray. And Murray was the nicest guy in the world. I wrote in the book, it was like putting on a pair of slippers. This guy was the nicest guy in the world, you know. And here’s the thing, Fred, and you kind of touched on it. When you meet these people in real life, you realize, oh, this guy reminds me of my uncle or my grandfather. You immediately recognize the personality type, and you’re thinking, Murray Jackson was the dispatcher. I know they’ve talked about, oh, he dubbed in these commands to tip it after the fact to cover up whatever they’re imagining. It’s like, there’s no way this guy’s involved in anything like I mean, all that stuff melts away as soon as you meet these people. So, that was a nice privilege to have, but at the same time, I tried to convey that sense in my book so that people that hadn’t met him could at least get a sense of the way I felt when I when I met him. But the same researcher had done the same thing, betrayed Murray and he was he was appalled years later he was telling me he said I couldn’t believe we had exchanged Christmas cards and everything and this guy just turned on me and said okay Murray tell me the truth what really happened what you were part of it right and it’s like oh my god so a lot of these guys if it didn’t happen to them specifically they heard about it and they were jaded so I’m coming in the wake of that kind of stuff and trying to get these guys to open up, right? And some of them would not talk at all. They just said, “I want nothing to do with it.” And just hang up the phone. I mean, this sort of reminds me of what’s happened to Ruth Payne, you know, this who went to in to interview Ruth and she lets him in and does all these interviews and all of a sudden it’s all about her being a, you know, member of the CIA, right? Just crazy stuff. And I went to her talk there in Irving uh was a couple maybe five years ago and I was with uh my good buddy Todd Vaughn. And so she began talking and we got they got about halfway through and I leaned over to him. I said, “So what do you think?” He goes, “Everything I thought about her has melted away.” And of course we had both heard all the conspiracy talk. And I couldn’t agree more. It’s like okay this this is not anything like the person we’ve been told that she is completely different. It’s just like I say when you meet these people not only does it give it a sense of reality uh because you see the personality taste but it also gives you an insight into this event as a historic event. It’s like other things that you may experience in your life and you look back on it, you go, “Wow, I get just three or four fleeting moments of that memory of of a whole weekend. You go to a concert. I just remember this one or two songs and something maybe happened when we went in and that’s it.” And yet when when conspiracy people interview these people and and I was like this at the beginning, so not to be too tough on them, but you kind of you’re expecting them to be able to remember things that you wouldn’t be able to remember about something that happened last week, let alone 25 years earlier. The best story to illustrate this, Fred, was uh I called Bill Alexander, and he was easily the most colorful person I ever talked to. This guy swore like a sailor or a truck driver, but he looked like your grandfather. So, it was very disarming and uh but yeah, he used every four-letter word and then some that he had combined in new extraordinary ways. So, very colorful guy. But at one point uh and I had interviewed him on the phone and in person, but during our interview on the phone in ‘ 83, I started, you know, I’m I’m doing the conspiracy thing where I’m I’m drilling down deep. Okay. So, so you went here and then what happened? You’re there about 5 minutes cuz I really I would do a lot of heavy research. I would find out everything they they had said uh either testimony wise or in a newspaper article. I would then have a list of questions that I would ask them in a specific order um with the one I thought might they might hang up the phone on me. I would ask that last so I get everything in that I needed. Right. But uh but I generally would call them and ask them to, you know, walk through your story and let them tell it unencumbered. That would give me questions that I hadn’t written down in advance. And then I would come back and I’d walk them through the story and have them go through slower while I’m asking questions. And I actually had an FBI guy that told me after I finished interviewing him, he says, “Wow, I just want to compliment you on your interview technique.” Because by doing it that way, you don’t taint the key is don’t taint the person you’re talking to with whatever you’re thinking happened. I started drilling down deep on a specific and he goes, “Let me ask you answer you this way.” He says, “I didn’t have a stopwatch. I didn’t have a tape measure.” He says, “This thing was like a blur.” He says, “I remember specific things very vividly, but the rest of it,” he says, “I don’t remember that much. And I certainly couldn’t tell you, you know, that this happened and then two minutes later or two and a half minutes later this happened. And so that was kind of an eye opener. I realized, okay, yeah, these guys, you can’t ask them questions like that and expect them to to know the answer. I remember somebody asked me, “Did you ever when you talked to Tia Bolley, who is the uh citizen uh who called in on Tippets Police Radio to report the shooting?” And he reportedly looked at his watch and said it said 110. And of course, everybody has used that uh ad nauseium to claim that the shooting happened much earlier than it actually did. And so they would they asked me, “Did you ever ask him about his watch?” And I was thinking, I don’t remember. And I had to actually go back and look at the transcript. And I was, as I was reading it, I was kind of, you know, you started to relive. I’m remembering, oh, I remember, you know, I remember the phone call. I remember him saying these things. And I remember, oh, that’s right. About halfway, this was after the Alexander phone call. And I remember about halfway through thinking, there’s no point in even asking this guy about his watch because a this is 25 years later. He’s not either way. It’s not you could never it would never hold up. If he said, “Yeah, I remember my watch was accurate.” There’s no way that would be believable. You couldn’t hang your hat on it any more than uh most people don’t know his interview in which he said that was actually an affidavit that was two weeks later. You know, he went on vacation. He came back, I think it was December 12th, uh and then gave that affidavit. So, and and so the accuracy of the watch was irrelevant. And I thought I by then I already had the Dallas police tapes and I knew there was a better way to determine the time of the shooting than his recollection of whether his watch was accurate enough or not. And of course it couldn’t have been accurate because the evidence is overwhelming that that shooting happened much later than he remembered from his watch reporting. You learn when you interview a lot of these guys that u that uh and I’m always afraid to to follow behind somebody else who’s done an interview of somebody because they’ve ruined the person. I remember FBI agent Bardwell Odum. I interviewed him and he he was out at the arrest scene at the Texas theater and he had done like a it was a three-s sentence report so there wasn’t much to the story but I thought you never know there could be you know what was the buildup. I wanted to find out why he was out there and so forth. Anyway, he told me this hilarious story. He says, “Yeah, there was a guy he called me one year.” He said, “Uh, can I come down there? I’m gonna fly down. I’m come down there and interview you.” He said, “Okay, if you want to, you know.” So, they arranged a day. The guy comes down. He says he sat here in my kitchen and talked told me for five hours what he thought had happened and then he left. He didn’t even ask me. He didn’t ask me anything about anything that he was involved in. and he just thought that’s all this guy wanted. And you know, I think there’s a lot of people that are kind of amateur armchair detectives that, you know, they’ll track down one of these guys that, you know, now it’s 30 years after I talked to him and there, you know, the guy’s memory is shot. He was probably not. You got people asking Bardwell Odell, do you remember writing a a 302 report on on uh showing Tomlinson the bullet or something? I don’t remember. Well, of course you don’t. He the man conducted thousands of interviews. I know. He doesn’t interview. Then they say, “Well, he didn’t do it. It didn’t happen.” Yeah. And then they said, “The 302 reports must have gotten deep sixed because all we have is this is this uh basically a uh conglomeration of various 302 reports.” Well, no, they didn’t do a 302 report. This is the report. That’s right. Just this is the report, you know. So, there are no 302 reports. And all those agents took notes and then the notes were destroyed for the very reason that we’re talking about so that they’re not grilled and questioned about now wait a minute on this note you added this word and in the report you left that word out. Now why is that? No. The way Hoover wanted it is you once it was committed to a final report. That’s it. This is the record and everything else goes bye-bye. And you know, you can understand that because you know, I mean, I’ve got stuff from my interviews and you know, people say, “Well, you know, how come we’ve never heard his interviews?” Well, first off, it’s my private property and uh eventually I’m planning to have this donated to some library, right? So, somebody will eventually get access after I’m long gone, and they’ll find out that everything that I’m saying is absolutely true. What? There’s no reason to not tell the truth. It’s all there. And uh so anyway, it’s uh I you know I think we’re past the part of being able to interview these pe most of these people are all gone, right? The vast majority of the And so but now and I predicted this years ago, Todd and I would be sitting around and I’d say, you know, eventually they’re going to be interviewing the cousin. Yeah. It’ll be the son of the guy and then it’ll be it’ll be his son. It’ll be the grandson of the guy. And so like you got they’ll ask you Erlene Roberts, you know, great grandson. Well, well, did she did did Oswwell come in at 1257 or did he come in at 1259? What did she tell you? You know, right? And then you hear, you know, and then we got this guy out in Australia who interviewing uh with the Markham family. Actually, it’s the daughter-in-law. So, it’s her son’s ex-wife. I guess he’s deceased now, but I think they were divorced. But regardless, it’s like, what? And then what she’s telling isn’t got any relation to reality. I mean, it’s not even close. You can tell, you know, when you talk to somebody, and I know people say, well, you know, like Jack Tatum, he came he came out 15 years later. You know, it’s that’s not credible because it wasn’t at the time. Well, credibility has more to do than just the chronology. There’s a lot going on there. Just like uh the people that ran uh the Dean’s Dairy Way, right? That I ended up just by happen stance. Well, they contacted me. That was a thing. Their grandson, I guess, contacted me after seeing a write up and saying, “Oh, you know, there’s a part of the story you don’t know about. I ended up interviewing them, but what they’re telling me fits in. You know, there’s some skewed things, but basically it does fit in with the the timeline, the chronology and with what we know is true about when you play telephone, you know, they get skewed and if everybody nobody knows what I’m talking about. There’s used to be a game you’d play telephone or you’d have people in a circle and somebody would start something and you’d pass it on. and they’d whisper it and then the last person would announce what it was and it had absolutely no resemblance to what had begun, what was actually said the first time because each person heard something different or added their own take to it. And that’s kind of what happens when you go through multiple hands with a story like that. So the big question I have for you is well who killed Tippet? Well, it’s obviously Lee Harvey Oswald, right? I mean, you know, you one of the things is if you look, and this is one of my big things, put things in a chronological order. And when you do that, you start to see how this plays out to the people in the order in which it’s happening to them. And then when they’re talking about it, you can see from their perspective, you know, how their part of the story fits in. I’ve always said that I know more about the shooting than the people who are actually there because I know all the parts. I have sort of this omnipotent view, if you will. I can I can step back from the trees and see the forest whereas each of the trees has their own perspective and that’s all they know or a couple of little interactions with others. And and so the uh if if you put things in chronological order, all of a sudden it becomes crystal clear, you know, what happened. Look, and the bottom line is is Oswwell’s caught red-handed with the murder weapon in his hand 45 minutes after the shooting. And when he stands up, he says two things. And for a long time, I thought it was one or the other. And that then that the two things that he supposedly said kind of got skewed. But I’ve I’ve been recently going back over that whole thing. And I’m I’m convinced that in the earliest retellings, he actually did say both things. He said, “This is it and it’s all over now.” So, I mean, two sentences that show resignation to what to what if he didn’t shoot just shoot a police officer and of course more than likely killed President Kennedy as well. Yeah. that whole, you know, so my book picks up, as you know, from after the assa, from the time of the assassination, the shots of Oswald’s escape from the Texas School Book Depository, how he got out to Oakliff, how he encountered Tippet, how he makes his way to the theater, and how he gets arrested. And all that happens within a 45minut span, and you know, all the viewpoints, police, spectators, it they all dovetail. It all overlaps. There’s little things that you know don’t agree completely, but that that would be expected. And so the people that claim, oh, this is all just a frame up and they coers these witnesses to no because it doesn’t read like that. They would the thing would be more in lock step with each other. The fact that things are skewed and there’s a little bit of difference in each story tells you, oh, this is the real thing. This is what happened. So I guess Larry Kfar didn’t did not kill Tippet. You’ve seen that story lately? Yeah, I have seen some of the craziest stuff written. And I uh I hesitate to use the names of the people that write some of this stuff because I don’t want to give them any more glory, if you will, or validation uh than their story deserves, which is nothing. But there’s one guy that uh just writes page after page. It’s like a stream of consciousness page after page and post this on these uh on the education forum, the UK forum. It you read this and it’s like I I I get three or four pages in. I’m already lost. What’s the point? I I’ve forgotten what the point is. But he actually had uh yeah, he’s got Larry Craford there. Uh and he’s got him in order to put his right hand print on the fender of the car and shoot with the left hand. He’s got this guy twisted into a pretzel in his mind and just concocting things just right out of the blue. And uh you know there’s him and then there’s of course that Harvey and Lee site and the guy that runs that website, Jim and you everybody knows his last name. Just totally made up Westbrook and Croy are in on it. They’ve got these two cops killing this other cop for they don’t really explain why, but somehow Tippet’s a dirty cop. But again, if you read the family stuff, it’s like there’s no way that’s even remotely true. And so, you know, I really have distanced myself from all that. I used to get into uh the arguments early on and uh and I found that it didn’t matter what kind of logic and rationale you used, they completely reject it. And so, there was no point. And a lot of those same people from 30 years ago have resurfaced. are back out there on the forums trying to validate their existence on the planet with absolute just rubbish. So I really feel sorry for people you we used to think and maybe you remember this when the internet first started I used to think wow this would be great for the JFK research not only will I be able to contact other people easier but you’ll be able to you know have you know good discussions and do the research and work together and so forth. It’s like none of that’s happened. It’s filled with crazy people. They’re just absolutely lunatics. The the only thing I I would say is is that, you know, I I know that if I fight with some of these zealots on the education forum, I’ll never never convince them of anything I say, no matter what. But I do think there are some people who lurk who just sort of are watching that you can influence, you know, who can see, oh, there’s sort of some sane people around who uh aren’t super uh crazy when it comes to arguments and they present some interesting arguments. So, I think you could win people that way, but the zealots, I mean, forget it. I mean, they’re they’re they’re unreachable. No. And so, I leave it to guys like you to take those people on. I did for a while. Now, it’s your turn, Fred. Yeah, you take them on and eventually there’ll be somebody else that’ll pick up the the baton and they’ll run with it. They do need to be challenged. I agree. And I do write occasional blog articles. Uh when it’s when it’s what I like to do is let them take all the rope they need and then when they’re done or when I think they’re done, then I’ll just wind that back in and let them hang themselves with it because they say some of the craziest stuff that’s just so easily unproved. Uh, I’ll just say one thing. For instance, years ago, you know, I bought a copy of the Dallas Police Tapes from Pen Jones. He was selling the the ZRA film and the Knicks films and and he had the Dallas Police Tapes, which the pedigree was actually uh from Judy Bonner, who got them from Marie Jackson, who got them from JC Poles. I mean, all this stuff kind of dubtales, but those tapes have been out. And it wasn’t until recently when I realized they’re not even nobody ever digitized that whole set and put them online. So most of these guys that are talking, they’re arguing about what’s in the transcripts and how the discrepancy in the transcripts and I’m thinking you don’t need the transcripts anymore. We have the recordings. Yeah. What what are you looking at the transcripts for? It doesn’t give you the time, you know. So the transcript shows a time check of 116 and then the next one is at 119. And I think in one of the transcripts there’s a typo and it says 110 and then they and then it’s typed over and says 119. So somebody’s making a big deal. Look, they’re altering they’re altering the transcript. They’re not altering anything. First off, you if you listen to the recording, you would see that 3 minutes went by between that 116 time check and the 119 one. So it’s can’t be 110, which is which comes up after 116 to begin with. And in fact, I there’s a Warren Commission document where they point this out. They said, “Hey, there’s a problem with this transcript.” They they noticed it back in 1964 and said, “This can’t be because the earlier check is 116. How can it go from 116 to 110 and then 119?” So that that’s why that was changed because it’s an obvious typo. But so you get people arguing about the time of the shooting and uh and what I love is they absolutely dismiss everything Helen Markham said except that 106 time that she gives for the time of the shooting which is a guess because in one of her early reports she said when they asked her about the time she says around 1:30. So they of course they ignore that one because the 106 is so much better. But obviously it can’t be 106. If you just listen to the the recordings and yeah they weren’t continuous but once the tippet shooting happened all that activity it the tape is almost uh continuous right for a large portion of it is continuous and all you have to do is do a linear regret regression. I I said that right in the front of my book and people act like they don’t know what the hell I’m talking about. All right. Well, type in linear regression and figure it out. I mean, it’s not that hard. You’re basically just plotting a a line on a on a graph and you’re seeing you’re seeing if the time checks that they’re given are falling within a parameter. Look, I was a disc jockey for years, right? We had a we had a sweep clock, right? And you would it you know, if I had a break that’s coming up and it it was scheduled for 110 and let’s say it’s really 109, I would just say it’s 110. Yep. you know, because it it didn’t it didn’t really matter. And then there was a sweep hand, so you know, you weren’t doing it to the second anyway. But I would I would find that generally speaking, if you looked up and saw where the sweep hand was at, if you were about 15 seconds on the sweep hand before the before the the spot-on minute at the top up until about 45 seconds after, you would probably say that minute. So, let’s say it’s 12 known. So 15 seconds before at 11:59 45 seconds you might start saying 12 noon and you would say 12 noon from then all the way till actually 12 noon plus 30 seconds or maybe 45 and then right in that 45 range you would tend to say it’s now 12:01 right so basically you know there’s sort of the think of it as sort of this 45se second floating window and so when I did the linear regression I’m looking at this and I’m imagining, okay, so here’s uh in particular, I think they use the 119 time check and they mention it three or four times. And that’s really the best when you find those instances where they mention that time check several times because you can then take that and you kind of slip this back and forth to test. Okay, so the first time he says 119, is that exactly 119? And the last time he says it, well, so let’s say it’s a minute later. Is now is he has he skewed the time a little bit? Let’s try it. So if I slip the whole thing this way back a minute earlier, so that his last 119 is actually 119. How do the rest of his time checks line up? And how do the time checks before that line up? Well, you find it that doesn’t work. So basically I do a linear regression of all the time checks and then you slide it back and forth and find the sweet spot where it actually matches right it’s precise during all of that time. Now is that exactly accurate supposed real time? Well no as as JC B said there’s no way really to correlate the tape recordings with real time. What’s real time? Are we talking atomic time in Washington DC? Uh, are we talking based on what how they’ve set their clocks in Dallas in the dispatchers’s office? So, there’s no real way. But we know it’s not five minutes off. Yeah. Yeah. It’s not, you know, it’s not 10 minutes off. No, you’re within 60 seconds of the real time. And so just for to put together my chronology, I then attached seconds because I’m measuring between events. So if the tape recording is running in real time and in some of the like I say right after the shooting, there’s a lot of activity. So it is pretty much running in real time. You can measure between this statement and that statement. That’s exactly 15 seconds. So I can say if he says it’s 119 here and that’s 119, this is 119 15. and so on and I could work through the whole thing. It’s not designed to say, okay, that thing happened exactly at 119 and 15 seconds. But it is designed to say that happened after the event that happened at 11910 and before the thing that happened at 11920, right? The chronological order is correct. The exact time could skew a little bit. And when it comes to the tippet shooting, you don’t, you know, we’re not talking about something where you need to be that precise anyway. Um, you know, Oswald, the the whole thing. Could Oswald have made it to the tippet shooting scene in time. And again, I was a conspiracy theorist, so I I know all the arguments. I know where the skeletons are buried. So, the the whole idea of that betrays the fact that, well, look at all the evidence that shows eyewitness accounts, the physical evidence that that he is there at the time of the shooting. So, therefore, he had to have made it. So, now you have to go back to, okay, so when was the last time he was seen? And then of course when when you really investigate that you find out okay it’s actually there’s a margin there’s a window when he could have got to his rooming house and it’s actually earlier than everybody thinks. Just because Erlene Roberts said he got he came in about 1. Now what does that mean? Does that mean it’s 10 to one? Does that mean it’s 5 to one? Does that mean it’s 10 after one? you know, so he and and then she said he was at one point she said he was only in his room long enough to put on the jacket and come back out. So she kind of uh suggested it was maybe 30 seconds or less. And then of course she made the statement where he was in there three or four minutes. And you and I both know plenty of people that when you ask him about timings, they’ll use the term minutes and not seconds when they mean seconds. Yeah. And you know because it’s just a frame of they just mean a short period of time and a lot of people have no sense of time. Being a disc jockey I actually got an an internal body clock after 10 years. I can tell when 3 minutes have gone by because I would know I’ve got so much time to get down and get a cup of coffee and come back up. I got to be back in the studio before that song ends. So you get a sort of an internal body clock. And I think cops, people that work jobs where the clock is an important factor in what they’re doing, I think they developed a body clock. So, I’m just saying that uh you know the that whole timing of when JD Tippet is is uh what time was he shot has been so misused and so mischaracterized. So using the tape recordings you find that the you know T uh or rather Domingo Benvitas he said he got in he couldn’t work the radio and you hear this mashing button sound again if you only have the transcripts and you don’t have the recording so you don’t know any of this right you don’t see somebody’s mashing the button like they’re they’re keying the mic but they’re not saying it. So they’re hitting the button and letting it go and what he’s probably doing is that’s he’s pushing the button down letting it go and he’s talking and of course they can’t hear that. So then he’s listening and nobody’s saying anything in response. So he he imagines it again and does the same thing. And uh now I’m I’m imagining that because I’m trying to figure out, okay, it didn’t work. Something like that had to have happened. And we can hear him mashing the button for almost a minute before Tia Bowie comes on who said that he walked up and here’s this here’s Domingo Benvitz in the front. He didn’t know his name, but he said there was a Mexican fellow there. He didn’t know how. He said, “I don’t know how to work it.” He takes the microphone and so from the last mash button there’s a short pause 10 seconds or 15 seconds and then all of a sudden Bowie comes on it’s clear as a bell. So you can see how this all lines up with both the stories that they told and the sounds we’re hearing. And when you wind that back from Bowie’s call, which if you look at all the time linear time regressions and the the time checks after that starts at about I think it now don’t quote me on this, it’s in the book, but I think it was 11734 something like that is when he first comes on and he talks for about 40 seconds. So, just after 118. Um, and if you wind that back, you can hear Bowi almost or I’m sorry, Domingo Benvdas almost a minute earlier mashing the button and we know that he didn’t jump right out of the truck. He said the guy went around the corner and so it’s not that hard. We know the distances involved. He he described him as trotting. We and everybody else did too. He’s he’s trotting to the corner around the corner. So you know, okay, it’s about 25 to 30 seconds to do that over 150 ft. And he said that he thought it was a domestic dispute. He thought the guy lived in the corner house, so he was afraid to come right out. But we also know that Helen Markham after when he went around the corner. The Davis girls have come to the front door. They’re seeing Helen Markham screaming, pointing, and saying, “He killed him. He killed him.” And then by her own account, Markham said as she ran to Tippet at that point. So it’s hard to imagine that Domingo Benvitas would be still sitting in his truck 30 seconds later when Helen Markham arrives at the body and we now know that other people are starting to come out of their homes. So the the idea that he sat Yeah, I believe he testified, I sat in the truck for several minutes. This is another incident where people are using the term minutes. And what they really mean is a short period of time, an unknown short period of time, but not necessarily minutes. And when you look at all that, you can see it’s probably a much shorter period of time. So anyway, you work all back. I ended up with my time of the shooting is at about 11430. So just before that’s when Oswalt stops Tippet. They’d probably have a 10-second uh conversation, nothing longer. And it occurred to me that um one of the and let me just say this, I don’t think JD Tippet had any idea that this was the presidential assassin or that he was in any danger. Generally, police officers don’t like somebody approaching the car when they’re seated because you can’t respond. And so I know some some people we we don’t know if Tippet called Oswald over to the car or he came over on his own valition, but I I I suspect Tippet wouldn’t have called him over to the car simply because he would have rather get gotten out and talked to him rather than be sitting in the car. But he could have. It’s possible, I guess. I’ve heard some people just as an aside say, “Yeah, it’s it’s very tight. It’s he’s just there. He’s just in time to get there.” that that made him hard for them to believe he did it. And I’m thinking, well, it’s not like he’s standing around waiting to shoot somebody. Of course, it’s just enough time to get there. And reality is very tight. I mean, by very nature, it has to be very tight. But yes, people don’t understand the whole nature of an alibi. If you really want to prove an alibi, you can’t say it would take you five minutes and you would only have you really only had 5 minutes and 4 seconds or you have to have you have to have something extreme to really prove an alibi. Exactly. what we’re all what we’re all doing when we recreate the the walk is proving it’s it’s possible. That’s it. It’s possible. And he had the jacket zipped up. I think when he leaned down, he’s got to be sweating. I’m thinking his hair’s got to be wet. It’s It’s stuck to his forehead. And if I’m a police officer, that’s the kind of thing that looks suspicious. You’d be thinking, well, it’s 68 degrees. Why wouldn’t you just take the jacket off and carry it? I mean, why has he got this thing zipped up? I also wonder whether his hair was disheveled because Bledsoe said that he looked a bit crazy on the bus. Maybe his hair was a bit disheveled as well. And uh it could have been and it was a windy it was considerably windy. Um and then there’s another thing that came out. Um the BBC did an interview with An McCraven. Now they pronounce it as McCravy. It was phonetically pronounced. But if you if you look in the uh if you look in the U city directory, there was a Charles Mc Raven M Capital R a V I N right and his wife’s name was Anne. And so that fits. So it’s not Anne McCra. It’s not Anne McCravy, it’s Anne McCraven. But in her BBC interview, she said that she saw the guy that eventually shot Tippet, who we know is Oswald, run by her house. Then she said, so in her chronology, the guy runs by and then the police car pulls over. The police officer got out and the guy shot him, you know, in a wink of an eye that quick. What intrigued me though was her statement that the guy ran by her house because it occurred to me, wait a minute, he can’t be running he can’t be running east on 10th, right, with Tippet driving up behind him because Anne McCraven lived in the house that was east of the shooting scene. If he’s running past her house, he’s got to be running toward the corner. And then that made sense with the chronology. She says he ran by the house, then the police car pulls over. So that got me to thinking that. Now my my theory that I proposed in the book, and that’s all it is. It’s just a theory, but it’s based on the eyewitness accounts. You had two groups of witnesses. One that said he’s walking west. We’re talking about Oswald. And one that says no, he’s coming from the east. And for a long time, people were were trying to say it was one or the other. And it occurred to me, well, wait a minute. What if what if it’s not one or the other? What if they’re both right? He is coming from the west. Does a quick about face and then is walking east. And that’s what causes Tippet to Well, when you realize where if he’s walking and where he stopped where he stopped by Tippet, I figured I back timed. Okay. Where would he make the turn? Where would he turn around? How close to the corner? We know he didn’t pass the corner because this was my main argument is Scoggins never saw him. He’s the cab driver sitting at the corner having lunch. He never saw him before the shooting. He he thought he was he thought he was walking west or at least he said I he was facing west when I first saw him. And frankly the cab would have been parked right there at the sidewalk where the intersection was. So, if Oswald had been coming from the east, as the Warren Commission said, he literally his pant leg would have brushed right against the the cab. How could how could he miss that? So, my thought was, okay, he’s coming from the other direction. Does an about face before he reaches the corner and is walking back. And as it turns out, there’s a bunch of trees and so forth, but there’s kind of a clearing right toward the the corner. And I think he’s just reaching that clearing. And here’s Tippet approaching. And they would have eye contact. Well, now add in the An McCraven thing. What if Oswalt’s walking briskly toward that corner, spots the approaching, the tippet car is quite a ways down the street, but he sees and he thinks, I got to get around the corner before he gets there. So, he starts running, runs past McCraven’s house, and it’s almost to the corner and realizes, now this is again all speculation, but realizes, I’m not I’m not going to make it. I’m not going to get to the corner before he gets there. So, he slams on the brakes, turns around, and starts walking back the other direction. Now, the only thing I’ve added into this that’s different from what’s in the book is I’ve added the possibility he actually might have been running that last few seconds before Tippet spot him, which would just look even more suspicious. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, the other thing that people don’t really factor in as well is that is that Oswald on his way to Tenth and Patton could have, you know, walked um through people’s gardens, backyards, and stuff and uh, you know, there were fewer fences back then, so maybe he didn’t, you know, he could have taken a more d a more direct route. Who knows? Yeah. And nobody’s ever really going to know. I’ve seen people re online recently speculating. We’ve all have. I did the same thing. What if he went this way and went that way? They’re trying to get him around to be coming back from the west, but they use the most, you know, the most the furthest route and they say, “Oh, it’s not possible he could.” No. Again, as you said earlier, to create an alibi, you got to look what’s the shortest the shortest possible way he could get there. And then if that doesn’t fit the window that’s available to him, then you might have something. But of course, it fits the window that’s available to him because all the other evidence again show that just supports it that yes, it’s him. There’s no question about it. So, the most direct route, we come right down Beckley. You do a little zigzag at Davis uh Patton to 10th and then he walks right down 10th in the opposite direction heading east, gets around close to Marcellis, returns and comes back the other way. And I remember Gary Mack years ago said, “Well, Dale, you would have walked right past Helen Markham and Scoggins and all these people and they didn’t see him.” And I and I had to remind him and other people have made the same argument recently. It’s like, no, the the other people aren’t sitting there waiting for the shooting. Look, Scoggins is at the gentleman’s club and he comes up only after he’s only in his cab a couple of, you know, a couple of seconds, maybe a minute, starting to eat his lunch when this happens. So, he’s not even in his cab. Roswell would have come by the first time. Helen Markham wouldn’t have left the washeteria yet by her own account when he came by the first time. Uh Bert and Smith were at their brother his Bert’s brother’s house over on 9inth and then they said they came back to his house over at at the corner there at at Denver and uh and 10th and again so they wouldn’t have been there the first time. So actually it’s almost as if Oswwell would have come through the neighborhood and then all the players moved into their position as he’s coming back. So yeah, it it could have still happened that way. I I tell you, Fred, I’ve spent more time thinking about this stuff, right, than anybody on the planet. And so, uh, I know the story pretty well. I know where the holes are and where they’re not. So, do you want to show us? You have some computer stuff. Do you want to show us? Yeah. All right. So, these are these are the color versions of the graphics that I used uh created for the book. And, uh, so this kind of gives you the the overall lay of the land. Uh, this is Jefferson Boulevard. If you can see the little hand motion here. Yeah. Uh here here’s here’s Tenth and Patton. This intersection here. And if we zoom in, this is where Tippet’s police car ends up stopping. And as everyone can see here, Tenth comes down, does a little elbow, and then this is Marcelis here. And that uh the bus stop where Oswalt’s transfer was good would have been right here at this corner. And this is the library right where Adrien Hamby parked his car here and ran across the lawn and uh CT Walker was driving down here and saw him run across the lawn and that’s when he hollered he’s in the library get some people over here. Oswald’s escape path is going to be down here behind the Texico station and then down the alley. So I’m going to uh I’ll walk you through here the next couple. So, we’ve kind of reoriented ourselves here. We’re we’re just east of Denver and 10th. And the first sighting of Oswald coming back in this direction is made by the foreman on this apartment job that was going on right here. And he left to go up to the Town and Country uh cafe to have lunch. Now, we’re not sure exactly where this occurred, but somewhere in this stretch uh east of the elbow and before Marcela Street. And you can see I’ve got Jimmy Bert and Bill Smith standing in front of his house. And then there was the uh the tile layer and his uh this is uh Jim Archer and Jim Brewer are eating lunch in in a truck here. Okay, so we got to switch our view around here. So, here’s our here’s our Oswald character coming down 10th Street passing in front of the um apartment complex being worked on and Bert and Smith are standing out in front here. Now, I didn’t talk to Jimmy Bert was killed in a traffic accident, so I didn’t interview him. Uh, but I did talk to Bill Smith and he said he never saw the guy walk by, the guy being Oswald. Bert, of course, always said he did see him before he got down to the shooting. So, it’s possible that Smith had his back to him. I asked Smith, “How was how was Bert’s veracity on this?” He said, “Well, we were all drinkers at the time.” So, but he says, “I didn’t see him. That’s all I can say.” All right. So, as Oswald approaches uh the corner, he does something really interesting. He goes behind the truck. So, these two guys are sitting in the truck and Jim uh Jim Archer is here in the driver’s seat and his buddy Brewer is sitting next to in the passenger seat. Archer didn’t notice the guy because, you know, uh Brewer is blocking his view as he approaches, but Brewer said, “No, no, the guy was coming from the west.” So, Archer doesn’t notice anything until the shooting happens way down the street. But the fact is Oswwell didn’t go in front of the truck. He went behind it, which I thought was interesting. It’s almost like he’s trying to avoid people. All right. So, now we have here’s Oswald approaching now the corner of Tenth and Patton. And you can see uh hang on a sec here. Computer is refreshing. All right. So, here comes Tippet. You can see the Abundant Life Theater down or the the Abundant Life temple down the street. Here comes Tippet’s patrol car. Scoggins is sitting in his cab here. Helen Markham is approaching the corner on her way to catch a bus down at the corner of Jefferson. And here comes Oswwell. Now, I’ve removed the trees on both sides of the street. So, there’s trees along about here. And then it kind of busts free and there’s only one tree located here. So, from from what I can gather, Oswell could have gotten as far as this bush right about this point before he turned around and started back on the opposite direction. And Anne McCraven, by the way, would have been living in this house. And Tippet’s going to pull up in front of this driveway right here. Okay. So, that’s our that’s our setup. Go to the next slide. All right. So, here’s the basically the moment when Oswell does an about phase. Tippa would have been just approaching the corner. You could have easily seen that happen. Ellen Markham is now standing on the corner waiting. Now traffic is also approaching from the other direction and just the traffic we know about. So we know that Jack Tatum is coming. So is Domingo Benvitas, but 10th Street’s actually kind of a busy street because people would use it to avoid Jefferson Boulevard and they could run parallel to it. So there could have been other traffic passing here at the time is all I’m saying. All right. And so on our next uh slide, just as Tippet is pulling up alongside the guy over here and Helen Markham is watching, right? Yep. And and by the way, Aquilla Clemens is working in this house here. Second house off the corner behind and beyond Helen Markham. If you come down here while this is going on, this is when Jack Tatum is coming up the street and starting to turn the corner. As he as he’s making this turn, he said he looked down the sidewalk and he could see Tippet just pulling over to the curb and this guy walking. So, he is one of the witnesses that as Oswwell coming from the east. And of course, Burton and Smith are over here on the corner and they’re looking down there. Again, I’ve removed trees just to make this clearer, but there’s a lot of foliage in between here that would make this not an easy view, a direct view. All right, next slide. Uh, Jack Gray Tatum now is folded front and coming right behind him is Domingo Benvitas in his pickup truck. And as Tatum is passing now, he says, uh, JD is leaning over in the car and Oswald has his hands in both hands in the zipper jacket, so he’s not actually leaning on the car. So, this is the 15 ft that Jack Tatum talks about that he was that close to Oswald. Everybody thinks, “Oh, it’s after the shooting.” And they’re going, “No, wait a minute. Oswell runs around the corner and Jack Tatum’s here. That’s that’s longer. That’s way more than 15 feet.” Now he’s talking about earlier when he drove by. He’s less than a car length away. So he got a good look at him. And then our next slide is just the time it takes Tatum to drive past and get to the intersection. And uh the stop sign is for traffic coming this way. So technically he could have rolled straight through. I know my own driving habits is any intersection I slow down and kind of I don’t necessarily stop at I’ll I’ll do a kind of bump and roll just to avoid I’ve seen too many people get t-boned at these intersections. Just because there’s no stop sign doesn’t mean somebody’s not going to run it. And this is where Oswald pulls the gun and shoots across the hood hitting Tippet. Domingo Beneditz pulls his truck into the curb. Helen Markham’s on the corner here. And it’s not really clear whether Aquilla Clemens hears the shots and comes out on her porch or is already out on the porch. But after the shooting with tip it down on the on the pavement, Oswald now leaves and cuts across this corner. The Davis girls come out on the front porch and so they’re only 15 20 feet away from as he cuts through these bushes. And the cab driver is rolled out of the cab. He started across the street and he realized there’s no place to hide. So he just come back and duck behind this rear quarter panel, the left rear quarter panel. And of course, uh, Ellen Markham’s on the corner watching all this. And we believe according to Aquilla Clemens account that she has come out off the porch. He’s either on the porch or in the in the uh in the process of coming out toward the sidewalk at this point. So this is our overview at at this juncture. And our next slide as well cuts through these bushes. And when he does, he’s throwing he throws a shells, two shells here. They did find uh another shell underneath this window. And it’s not clear where um Barbara Davis found her shell, but I believe in this area here. And of course, then there was a fifth shell that their father-in-law recovered. And that probably was recovered here as well. So the two that Domingo Benvdas recovered were probably the two that were right in this area. Right. So as Oswald passes, he uh Scoggins here who’s kneeling down behind the car, hears him say, “Poor dumb cop or poor damn cop.” So Oswwell starts down the street goes a short distance and as we’re going to see here next slide

by now Frank Samino who lives in the second house here has come out he hears the gunshots here’s screaming he comes out Helan Markham is hollering he killed him he killed him the Davis girls are here at the front door and Oswald’s come around the corner and he’s heading down this side of the sidewalk, but then quickly crosses the street probably because Sam Guiinard is washing a car here in the alley and he can see if he continues down, he’s going to run right into this guy. So, he crosses the street and he’s coming this way. Now, over at standing on the porch of this used car lot is Ted Callaway, who I thought was the best witness that I ever talked to and maybe the best witness in the whole thing. He hears the five gunshots. Friends of his that were with him, Bey Cersei, who I’ve got shown here, and some other people are standing there in the office, and they said, “Well, somebody’s got firecrackers.” And he being a uh US Marine during World War II and trained on the pistol range in San Diego later, immediately recognized those are pistol shots. He runs to the sidewalk and when he gets here, he said he looked up the street and he sees the cab driver crouched behind the car and just then he sees like a genie. He sees Oswald materialized jumping through this bush coming toward him, crossing the street and coming down with the pistol in a raised pistol position. And as soon as he crossed the alley and got about right here, he’s about 56 feet away. This is when uh Ted Callaway hollers to Oswald, “Hey man, what the hell is going on?” And he kind of slows up. Now, the cars are parked across the sidewalk, so Oswalt’s got to come out. He either go in front of the uh traffic, but according to the used car people on the Johnny Reynolds lot, he comes out into the street and actually finishes this journey down the center of the street. And so he comes around these cars, comes back to the sidewalk here. In the meantime, out on the front porch with Johnny Reynolds on this upper porch, Johnny Reynolds comes out with LJ Lewis and BM Patterson and Harold Russell. So they’re watching this guy coming out down the street onto the sidewalk and he gets almost to this corner. Now, this isn’t quite completely accurate, but according to uh there was one additional eyewitness that I talked to who was, you know, this was the Harris Brothers motor lot, and the owner the owner’s son was actually dropped off. There’s a bus stop. The bus stop that Helen Markham was going to was on this corner to go downtown. And then the opposing bus stop was on this corner going this way. And so Jimmy Harris, the son, had been in with some friends, school friends down at the motorcade, watched the parade and it was coming back just as this was happening. So they’re on the bus. He’s just getting off or had just gotten off the bus, was here a short time. So he said Oswwell came to this corner and looked like he was going to cross the street and then hesitated and then turned and started up toward Mars Brothers in this direction. So a little bit of a detail that most people aren’t aware of. And uh at this point is when Reynolds and BM Patterson decide we’re going to follow the guy. So they’re following across the street. They’re kind of tailing Oswald as he comes up the street here. Now, the way they originally told the story is Oswald comes up, passes the the Dean’s Dairy Way, which is a convenience store, if you will, like a 7-Eleven, and then cuts between this building and the the Texico service station and into the back of the lot. And uh then Reynolds said he and Patterson run across the street and they talked to the mechanic and and they say, “Oh yeah, the guy just came by here.” Well, the way that Brocks told it is, “No, five minutes elapsed between the time Oswald passes them and Reynolds comes over here.” And so then I years later, I get the story from the dairy way that in fact Oswald attempted to get into one of these buildings. Now, I I’m showing the dotted line here between the buildings cuz we’re not sure which one he attempted to get into, but when the police got there and WFAA was filming, Ron Ryland was filming, they’re filming the back of this house. So, it could have been this one as opposed to this one. But what’s interesting, and we’ll go to the next slide. If you go around the back, the stairs, these these 3D models I built are based on photographs. The stairs coming to this upper balcony do come in from this side. So Oswald could have slipped between the two buildings. Come up here. Now the reason what what she heard that is um Dodie Dean was working cash. She heard somebody like trying to break into one of these doors and then heard somebody coming down a set of rickety stairs. And when she looked up, Oswald’s passing in front of her, kind of taking the jacket off as he’s passing in front of the store. And of course, he’s then going to go between these two buildings. So, it’s a little unclear exactly uh whether he’s breaking in back here or breaking in down here or coming around the front. But we know that there was a delay and that Reynolds and Patterson who were over here. But when they told the Brocks 5 minutes later about a guy passing him, they said, “Yeah, he probably shot a policeman.” Well, if you think about it, there’s How do they know a policeman was shot? They hadn’t been to the shooting scene. or had they? So, I surmise. And the other thing is is when the police are brought over here, Reynolds is telling him he thinks the guy’s hunkered down in one of these buildings. So, I’m I’m pretty certain that he thought he went into one of the buildings. He and Patterson then leave. Probably not. Probably Patterson stays. Reynolds goes first. And then of course uh Reynolds, Warren Reynolds is the one who gives the first description to uh Roy Walker who’s at the tippet shooting scene and uh and then he brings the police back here and of course the rest of the story. So we’ll go to the next slide. So what happens is is after Oswald tries to break into one of these buildings, probably the closer one, he passes and there’s like three garage doors. This is the type of building this is. The cash register is right here. And Dodie Dean sees Oswald as he walks by and uh taking in the process of taking the jacket starting to take it off. So he then cuts back next to the Texico service station comes back and then the jacket is eventually found behind this car back here. So he cuts between the buildings and then probably re-enters the alley. And one of the reasons that believe that’s true is that in the meantime way back over here, Bert and Smith have run down to the shooting scene. They see that it’s a police officer and by their accounts, they ran down this way with the intent of going all the way to Jefferson. But when they got to the alley entrance here, they looked down this way and they said they saw the guy running west in the alley. Okay. And so the timing is such that this would have been after he reentered the alley and to them they always thought no, he had cut through the alley to begin with and ran all the way down this way. So that’s how that whole story about um that Helen Markham then later told because Burton Smith were friends with her son Jimmy Markham. That’s how that whole story got um told that oh he cut through the alley and never went to Jefferson. No, there’s plenty of there’s plenty of eyewitnesses that show that he went all the way to Jefferson and then later Helen Markham I think in the late60s started telling how he cut across this lot into the alley and went. So there were later stories that got told and embellished. So in anyway, uh within within two minutes or three minutes of the shooting, Oswald is gone. He’s out of there. All right. So 20 minutes later, here’s how the arrest unfolds.

Hardy Shoe Store is about this distance, about 100 yards from the front of the Texas theater. And uh so as as we know the story, Oswald had stepped into this glass vestibule. Johnny Brewer saw him, thought he was acting suspicious. A police car with a siren makes a U-turn and they’re basically responding to the the Oakcliff Library call for a suspect. And as soon as Oswald starts up the street, Brewer comes out and he’s standing here. Now, he didn’t come out right away because he said Oswald was almost to the theater by the time he came out. So, there was some delay before he came out, but he’s standing here. Now, he knew Julia Postal. And while Oswalt’s heading toward the front of the theater, a police car, another police car zips past the Texas theater, excuse me, and this brings Julia Postal out of the ticket booth, right? So, she comes out to the comes out and she’s facing West and this gives Oswald an opportunity to slip behind her back into the theater. And of course, what he doesn’t know is that Brewer is seeing this happen. So Brewer comes up the street and asks Julia Posto, “Did you see that guy?” And she sort of h expected to see him because she said when she was coming out of the booth out of her peripheral vision, she saw a guy approaching and then when Brewer comes up, she realized, well, the guy never passed me and he’s nowhere to be seen, so he must have gone into the theater. And this is what alerted Brewer to go in. him and uh Butch Burroughs kind of make sure that no one’s left the exit doors, so he must still be in there. He Brewer comes back out as Postal call the cops and of course they now come to the theater. So this is the view if we’re the screen. We’re looking back onto the main floor. There’s two main aisles, a center section and then a left and right section. Oswald is sitting third row from the back, second seat in when he’s arrested. Originally, he’s in the fifth seat in. And today, these three rows are gone. They built a little stage back here. So, if you go there now, you can actually see the drill holes in the cement where they’ve removed rows. So, you could actually take a tape measure, which we did, measure the distance between these three rows, and then you could use that or these four rows. Use that. take the last row that’s there currently and measure back and you could you could basically figure out exactly where Oswwell was sitting. Anyway, he’s in the fifth seat in and Brewer has gone down and he’s down here near the front um behind the velvet uh curtains that are hanging at this exit here. And uh when the house lights come up, he sees Oswell back here in this fifth seat stand up, step to the aisle like he’s going to exit. And of course, the cops are pouring in. So, he just sits back down in the second seat and that’s when uh McDonald and the and the cops are at the back door and they start rattling the back door. Brewer lets him in, points out, “Yeah, I can show you the guy. He’s in the brown shirt.” He points out Oswald. There’s very few PE patrons in the theater. McDonald comes down. He searches these two guys and basically comes up the row this way at the same time. And I don’t I can’t remember the officer’s names, but I believe it’s TA Hudson and CT Walker. And there’s another uniformed officer. They come up. And so when McDonald approaches Oswald, he’s kind of facing this way. And then at the last second, he spins toward Oswald and says, “Get on your feet.” These three officers are now entering the row behind Oswald, Oswald’s row, and a row in front of him. So they’re kind of coming in from this direction. And McDonald, of course, says, “Get on your feet.” Oswalt stands up, brings his hands up without being asked about shoulder high. And as he does that, he says, “This is it. It’s all over now.” And when McDonald reaches down to pat down his waist, Oswald slugs him and then reaches for the gun. And the fight ensues. These three guys come running in. They pull Oswald back over the seat in a in a headlock, this officer behind him. The other two officers get on both hands, and of course, it’s a little bit of chaos before they subdue him, right? And so, uh, there you have it. That’s the shooting to the arrest. And that covers from 115 to about 150. So, about 35 minutes is the time period that we looked at. As David Bellon said, this is the Rosetta Stone of the GFKs. I mean, it’s just so clear. The evidence is so so overwhelming and and yet people just can’t seem to accept it. Yeah, it’s pretty straightforward. I mean, he’s caught red-handed with the gun in his hand. And you’ve heard the thing probably about the bent firing pin, which I traced back to it was a newspaper article in which they were trying to speculate why the shell didn’t go off. When Oswald fired, it clicked. Now, there are a couple of versions. McDonald always said the web of his thumb, you know, he he grabbed the they’re you’re taught to grab the cylinder so that it can’t rotate when you’re trying to pull the trigger, right? and and so his that puts the web of his hand on the near the back of the cylinder that the hammer the hammer comes back and as it snaps forward he said it caught his hand there were numerous officers that said they saw a dent near the primer we’ve seen the shells that were taken out of the boat none of them have a dent there there is one with a slight dent but it’s way off center and couldn’t have been caused by the hammer striking the primer uh lightly or whatever. So, uh, who knows whether the Now, there is a little bolt in a in a revolver. There’s a little bolt lock. So, it’s a double-action pistol. You you can you can pull the hammer back, right? And it clicks and this little metal slide gets locked in there and that holds the hammer back until you pull this the trigger a second time basically, and that releases the lock and the hammer comes forward. or as in a in the doubleaction revolver that it was, you just pull the trigger once, comes all the way back, and if you keep pulling the trigger, that lock never gets into place, and the hammer comes down and and hits the shell. It’s not clear as to what happened, but it is clear that Oswald did attempt to fire the pistol. Certainly had it pointed at at uh McDonald’s head. Yeah. I mean, how do you explain that? This is it. It’s all over now. And then he tries to basically go out in a in a in a cop suicide and of course that doesn’t happen and uh he’s caught red-handed, you know. And so I would just briefly say the one of the main arguments that was made early on by Sylvia Maher and Mark Lane is they suggested and that’s all they could ever do. They suggested the shells have been switched because Jo, the way they explained it, couldn’t find his marks. But if you look at Joe Po’s testimony, he’s very clear that he can’t remember whether he made the marks or not. And Jim Lavell told me years later, and he knew Po, you know, they still went went to retirement parties and uh gettogethers with the police association. He said, “Look, you know, sometimes officers just get in over their heads.” He says uh he didn’t mark the shells. There was no reason to mark the shells in the scene. The head of the crime lab, George Dowy, was there collecting shells. He took he he was the one that took the shell directly from uh Barbara Davis. There’d be no reason. But Po could give the shells to Dowy. Dowy could put his mark on it, which he did. Verify these were given to me by Po. He would testify to that. And that there’s the chain of custody. You didn’t need Po marking the shelves. and and also a post said that he he marked his initials JMP. Well, I went to the National Archives, right, for my book to to look at the shelves for his hand, something that no one had ever done. I hired a photographer to come in and take photos so that we could put them in the book. I made sketches of the marks because they’re very hard to see. You got basically, you know, you’ve got burnt propellant in there that’s years old and then you’ve got these marks that are are scratched through the burnt propellant. And of course, it’s now oxidized, so some of it’s kind of green on the inside, but they’re very hard to see. And there’s no way that you could take that little shell, which only has an opening of about a quarter of an inch, and put any kind of you couldn’t put three initials in there. You’re lucky if you can get one. Most of these cops said they put a mark in it that they would recognize. They didn’t necessarily initial it because there’s no there’s no room to initial it. You just now George Dowy kind of put it’s almost a scripted D like you would a cursive kind of the letter D and it’s kind of a in one of them it’s kind of clear what it is the other one it’s kind of a butcher’s job some of the other guys simply made a z an O and kind of put a line through I mean all they’re looking is I’ll make a mark that I will recognize as the one I made and so the uh the two shows that the Davis girls turned in there’s a clear line of you know forget Po let’s take him out of the equation the other two shelves were clearly there’s a clear chain of of uh possession and so what’s the argument now they switched only two of the shelves I mean and and then you’ll hear that from stupid people who read comic books and watch TV shows that don’t know what the hell they’re talking about saying well yeah it was just a sloppy frame up yeah right yeah it’s a sloppy frame don’t be stupid and then when would they do it here’s the other thing years ago I was still a conspiracy theorist Paris and I got hired to be the tippet spokesperson on front lines 1993 show who was Lee Harvey Oswald. I had gone to the AS conference in Chicago. I met Gus Russo there. He found out I was the into the tippet shooting. He was the connection. He made the connection between me and Frontline. I go out to WGBH in Boston. I meet Mike Sullivan. I go into his office and he says, “Well, tell me about the tippet shooting.” So, you know, I’m laying out the big grand conspiracy plan, you know, from memory. Here it is. I lay it all out, the switch shells, all the stuff that everybody talks about today. And uh he looked at me and he said, “What if you’re wrong?” And I was floored. My first thought was, “Man, I didn’t make a convincing case.” But he wasn’t asking that. He was simply saying, “What if you’re wrong?” Because in everything I was saying, I was raising the same questions that Sylvia Maher and Mark Lane and every con Larry Ray Harris, all the conspiracy people had brought up before that, but never tried to answer. And I thought, okay. And then so I I realized if this is going to be the ultimate book on the tip of shooting, and at that time it’s going to be a conspiracy book, I’m going to have to answer the questions. I can’t just do what everybody else did. I’m gonna have to answer the questions. And so I like what uh when I did finally finish the book and I ended up convincing myself that in fact Mike Sullivan was correct. I was wrong. And uh and I asked uh Bob Johnson who was the head of the AP in Dallas at the time to write the forward. I was very glad to see that he wrote a line in there something about Meyers. uh to get to the truth, all he had to do was lift up every stone and look under every rock. And really, that’s really what it was. It was come up with the answers. Like, okay, so who was the mysterious guy that Nick McDonald talked about in his byelined article that he said a mysterious fellow, even his dad, I don’t know who it was, pointed out Oswald. Well, it turned out when you dug into the story, he didn’t write the story. The story was written by a staffer. And I asked Bob Johnson, he recognized the style and he told me who it was who wrote the story most likely. Now, he didn’t know for sure, but he said the style was reminiscent reminiscent of this particular writer. And he said, “In fact, we never would let I mean, and it makes sense. We’d never let Joe Citizen write the article. We would write the article for them. They would read it over, make sure it’s and then they would they we would put their by line on it because it made it better. Here’s Nick McDonald telling the story of the arrest, but it’s not written by Nick McDonald, right?” So the whole idea of the mysterious person and I and of course when I talked to Nick McDonald, you know, to button up the the the story completely, who did you mean by the mysterious? No, I just meant Johnny Brewer. So, you know, all the stuff begins to melt away. And I found it was just like uh picking up a handful of sand at the beach and letting it run through your fingers. Eventually, you’ve got a handful of nothing. And that’s what today all they all they can do is grasp at the sand and come up with chain of custody. Yeah. And I would challenge them what with the same question Mike Sullivan challenged me with. What if you’re wrong? And then try and prove yourself right or wrong. Yeah. You know, and eventually you’ll find out the truth. Everybody’s got to do their own journey. I can appreciate that. Yep. Again, going back to I went the long way around the barn, but I wrote down what I found. Uh, most people are not going to have the advantage of being able to interview a lot of the people that I did because they’re long gone, but their story is preserved and I think the the abundance of the evidence is clear. Oswald killed Tippet. Absolutely no question about it in my mind anyway. And uh it’s a historic fact as far as I’m concerned. Well, I’m glad you took the long way around the barn. And again, I strongly recommend everybody, everybody go buy this book.
It has to be in your collection. If you can’t find it, find it secondhand or in Kindle. It is worth every page, every penny. It’s a great great book.
Thank you very much.
Thank you, Dale, for appearing on On the Trail of Delusion.
Oh, thanks for having me. It was a pleasure.

On the Trail of Delusion, Episode 24, Lawrence Haapanen on UFO’s, JIm Garrison, & the JFK murder

www.mattkprovideo.com/2025/09/29/on-the-trail-of-delusion-episode-24-lawrence-haapanen-on-ufos-jim-garrison-the-jfk-murder/

On the Trail of Delusion, Episode 24, Lawrence Haapanen on UFO’s, Jim Garrison, & the JFK murder

TRANSCRIPT:

(INTRODUCTION:)

I want to thank everybody for coming this afternoon. My name is Fred Litwin.
Noted author Fred Litwin. And of course, Fred is also the author of I was a teenage JFK conspiracy freak, On the trail of delusion. and Oliver Stone’s film Flam. The demagogue of Dealey Plaza.
Fred Litwin is here. He’s a longtime author and certainly watcher of politics.
Joining us, Fred Litwin, great to have you here.
Thank you very much.

[Music]

Welcome to another edition of ON THE TRAIL OF DELUSION, where I try to separate the wheat from the chaff and try to give you something substantial on the JFK assassination rather than the usual gruel you find on YouTube and around the internet.
Today my guest is Larry Haapanan who is an historian out west um who’s been long involved with the JFK assassination.
He’s been involved with the military and investigating UFOs and he’s got a long career on the history side uh both JFK the presidency and the assassination. So welcome Larry. And uh first question is how did you get into the JFK assassination? Well, um I guess because it happened. Uh and at that time, November 22nd, 1963, I was attending u college at the University of Washington. I was a history major and um I also happened to be an ROTC cadet. So the day it happened, I was wearing my army uniform, Army ROC. I later shifted over to Air Force, but I I happened to be home for lunch and uh an older woman from down the hall knocked on the door and said she wanted to use our phone and apparently she was having trouble with hers and she said the president had been shot and of course I was dumbfounded and so I watched the coverage on TV for a while. Then I went to uh back to class. Everything was cancelled that afternoon and uh of course that whole weekend was kind of a you know a bewildering uh unreal kind of a experience uh all the way through the shooting of Oswald and the the funeral the following Monday in Washington. And uh so as a history major, I kind of perked up my ears and was, you know, paying maybe more attention than the average person to what seemed to be history in the making. I um in my teenage years, I was a kind of a Civil War buff and that peaked an interest in the Lincoln assassination, right? And I had a book by Otto Eisenchiml that I picked up at a secondhand bookstore. And uh you know, so I had I had a past interest in that. So the Kennedy assassination wasn’t the first one I got interested in, but I waited, you know, of course, uh eager to find out what the Warren Commission would decide, right? uh immediately after the report was made public, the networks, TV networks had special programs on the Warren Report and so I audio taped uh I think ABC’s special report right on that and for quite a long time then afterwards I was kind of you know pretty content to let the Warren report be a accurate summation, you know, of of what had happened. I guess maybe I wasn’t going as far as Gerald Ford when he said the Warren report would stand like a gibraler of factual literature through the ages to come. But nevertheless, during the years to come, I I uh pretty much um thought the War Report had dealt with it adequately. But then in 1966, I made the dubious choice, I guess, that that kind of changed my life in a way of of getting a copy of Rush to Judgment by Mark Lane right after it came out, right? And that made me think that perhaps there was a conspiracy. And so then I started delving into the 26 volumes at the university library you know and getting books by Weissberg for example and later Sylvia Maher and Edward j. Estein of course
nd looking you know what articles began to appear in magazines like look and ramparts and Saturday Evening Post and Minority of One and Esquire. Then of course in I guess February 1967, I was walking down a street in Los Angeles. I think I was there on a debate trip and you know there was a headline, Jim Garrison is investigating the assassination. So of course I began following the u the Garrison investigation which I probably will touch on later. So that’s how it happened. So yeah, I mean I mean Mark Lane was very very influential. I mean, did you start corresponding with some of these people back then? Uh, no, I didn’t. In 1967, I graduated and got my commission in the Air Force and went on active duty. From the money I got from my first paycheck, I ordered the 26 volumes of the Warren Commission. I hadn’t been able to afford the $76 before that. That doesn’t sound like a lot today, but back then it would be like a whole month’s rent. You know, it was many hundreds of dollars in today’s money. and and so I began researching the 26 volumes on my own. And then in 1968, I joined up with a couple of other guys from Seattle, my hometown, in the Washington State Citizens Committee of Inquiry. Then I began to meet, you know, know other people. You knew you knew George Renard from Seattle and Paul Hul and Halverb and Bill Turner in the Bay Area and Fred Nukem in Los Angeles and through him David Lifton and Ray Marcus I met uh William Costalano other people of that area and George Renar, right? You knew you knew George? Oh yeah, George Rener was a lifetime friend of mine. We Right. Yeah. I continued to uh know him for decades. He passed away in 2017 and and uh I really lost a friend when he passed away. Yeah, he has some of the more interesting letters and stuff uh that are out there. I don’t know if there’s anything more in his papers, but it was always interesting to read a George Rener uh letter. Well, yeah, he had a terrific sense of humor as did Fred Nukem. They they their letters would sometimes, you know, turn to satire and jokes. And George mailed uh Fred a dead cockroach on one occasion and that was named Andy. And you know, they they had in particular a real uh humorous uh take on things at time. What was your experience just curiosity with Raymond Marcus? Because I I sort of gather from some of his letters he seemed rather pedantic, but what what was your experience with Raymond Marcus? I met him once when he came over to Fred Nukem’s house and I happened to be staying with Fred. Okay. Fred and Ry had a very contentious relationship to put it mildly because Fred loaned him a copy of the Zapruder film and Ray wouldn’t give it back and you probably know about that. Yeah. That’s all related to the Farewell America story. Uh you bet. Yeah. Okay. So, look, tell how did you get involved with the with the Garrison investigation and what did you do um for for Jim Garrison? Well, yeah. The ironic part of it is I was a serving officer in the US Air Force. Therefore, I had a kind of a arms length relationship with the garrison investigation. But uh what happened was um Ed Jeffs who was a reporter for the Tacoma News Tribune and chair of our committee in the Seattle Tacoma area, he um called me one day when I happened to be home in Seattle because I would go there uh sometimes on weekends or on leave and um he said, “Hey, we’re southern cops.” which of course wasn’t technically true, but you know, he was trying to joke around a little about it because he had gotten these letters from Garrison’s office appointing him and me as representatives of Garrison’s office. This is in like September 68, you know, several months before the Shaw trial, right? And uh the office would send those letters out to literally God only knows who or how many. And I know I had one, Ed had one, Fred Nukem had one, which I’ve seen, and you know, I’m sure others. Do you still have yours? Oh, definitely. Okay. Love to see that. Oh, yeah. Well, you know, I take I have mixed emotions because on the one hand, I thought there was um some hope for the Garrison investigation and then Fred and I turned out to be disillusioned about that after the Shaw trial, but at the same time, I felt like I was doing something, right? The president had been shot down like a dog in the street, and there were what seemed to be good questions that had been raised about it. And the vast majority of Americans, you know, may have thought that there was a conspiracy, but they weren’t doing anything. They weren’t lifting a finger, right, to look into it themselves. And so, um, I didn’t have any direct communication with Garrison’s office. And that was I I think the way I wanted it, but I did go through uh Steve Burton occasionally. He was the uh citizens committee of inquiry chairman in Los Angeles, right? A young college student at the time. Basically, I went out on my own, you know, to kind of uh pursue a u a avenue of inquiry that nobody else was pursuing on Garrison’s investigation. And that was looking into G. Clinton Wheat. Clinton Wheat is a uh another fellow who was subpoenaed by Garrison, I think at the same time as Dr. Stanley Drenin, right, in Los Angeles. And that came about because Lauren Skip Hall had uh told Garrison about these two guys and and he knew them both well. and um you know he talked to Garrison about how they had been uh leaders in the right-wing movement in the LA area and um and wheat had had meetings in his home in Los Angeles where where uh people like uh Colonel um Gail of the California Rangers and Edward Eugene Bradley and uh Paul and you know other people right Garrison was u at least somewhat interested in uh you know they were uh people that would go to these meetings these so-called patriotic meetings at wheat’s house and so Garrison wanted to talk to wheat and Dannon Dannon went to court and got a judge to um turn down uh Garrison’s request for Drenin to go testify on the grounds that Grant Drenin said he had patience as a physician. He had patients that depended on him for uh treatment and he just couldn’t tear himself away from LA, right? And the judge went along with that. Wheat, on the other hand, just went on the lamb. He just picked up uh and it so happened that he had been living for several years just outside Clamoth Falls, Oregon, which is where I was stationed at the Air Force at the time. So I was uh you know we and and I had been in the same place. Um so that put me kind of Johnny on the spot to uh look into wheat. So Wheat was from Louisiana. He was a convicted murderer who had gotten a pardon. Um he was um a heavy equipment operator by occupation and had moved to LA, owned a very large house and um set himself up as you know kind of a leader of the far right there. In 1964, he chaired something called uh committee of 1 million Caucasians to march on Congress. Uh they didn’t actually have a million people show up at that time. And he was also a guy who the FBI had an eye on. And um he he moved to LA or from LA to to Oregon. Was Was he a Minute Man as well or? Well, I’d put him You know, it’s hard to separate the groups in LA. That’s right. The California Rangers, the Christian Defense League, the NSRP, right? They they over overlapped. Yeah. Uh I think in their membership and in their uh certainly in their goals. So whether he was ever officially a Minute Man, I doubt. But um he was part of that paramilitary. Right. Right. Yes. So I set off to try to find out what happened to him and I got in touch with reporters at the Reading Record Search Light newspaper down in California, right in California. And they were covering this because wheat had been traced to a cabin in a remote location in Shasta County, California. and they had actually interviewed his wife. Uh but he had disappeared a second time. Uh one day a car arrived. He piled in and people drove him away leaving his wife behind. And um so I was able to, for example, you know, listen to a taped interview with Mrs. Wheat. Uh one one reporter in particular um Wes Hughes was very uh active in uh investigating wheat and that that and also you know other associated characters. So, um, I kind of teamed up with Wes Hughes for a while, and I also got myself acquainted with Hal Hunt, who lived in Bernie, California, and he was the right-wing racist publisher of, uh, the National Chronicle, uh, which had a rather wide readership, I think, in the far right. and he was an old fellow who was sort of uh I guess hungry for some kind of company or someone to pay any attention to him. So I would occasionally drop by and talk with him at his office and um we got along pretty well although of course I was totally out of step with his uh political beliefs. But he thought that I was kind of a fellow traveler with his cause. So or else I wouldn’t be there. Uh so he would um he would tell me things and uh was you know quite um talkative uh and and so that was interesting. And then I talked to people in law enforcement. I really don’t know why some of these I talked to right-wingers in Los Angeles about wheat and his male. Uh, one lady in particular, her daughter, a teenager, had uh, apparently run off with a fellow named Joseph Raymond Kerry who was originally from Texas and been living in Southern California and and he was apparently a minute man. and uh Carrie and this lady’s daughter had disappeared and she had written to all kinds of the local hardight paramilitary types in these different groups I previously mentioned. So she gave me a list of the people that she’d written to to look at and it was, you know, kind of like a who’s who of the more notorious characters, right? White wing in the LA area whose names I ran across in print in various places or newspaper stories or so on, but I never found wheat despite my uh digging. Do we know what ever happened to him? Yes. He he died in 1979 in Shasta County, California. In other words, he eventually came back to Shasta County with his wife, right? In the 70s, I guess, and lived there until his death and then he was buried back home in North in Louisiana, right? Yeah. His his wife told the story that she had heard from somebody who said they were an army man and that she would go to Colorado Springs. She could see your husband again. And apparently he made some illusion to an army fort. Uh I forget the name of it off hand that was near Colorado Springs. She herself seemed to be kind of doubtful about where he had initially gone. Hal Hunt told me something interesting though because we were talking about wheat, you know, basically uh taking off for parts unknown after he was subpoenaed. And and Hunt told me that if Wheat went to New Orleans and talked to the DA, the whole right wing would be finished. And I think that’s kind of an exact quotation of what he said. I guess there was a fear that wheat had um such an inside knowledge of this far right wing of of characters. It would not be a good idea for him to sit in front of a grand jury. Yeah. I mean I think of I mean uh Edgar Eugene Bradley who was in the middle of that crowd. I mean, it appears that the only reason Garrison got interested in him was basically a feud between him and some of the other right-wingers. Oh, you bet. Yes. In August 1968, I went to Los Angeles and a meeting was set up between me and the two major witnesses against Bradley. Uh, and I guess I can name them because I doubt they’re alive, but Carol and Tom Thornhill, right? Yeah. Yeah. names that a lot of people I think will recognize if uh and they told me all kinds of things, you know, about how Bradley was this uh leader of a faction of the Minutemen that wanted Kennedy dead, not really a Dew faction, but a rival faction. And then um I went down again in early ‘ 68 after the Shaw trial. And one night at Fred Nukem’s I said, “Why don’t we phone Bradley and see if we can talk to him?” And Fred was a little dubious about that, but I got on the phone and I talked to Bradley and he said, “Come on over.” So Fred and I went to Bradley’s house and u he met us at the door and said, “Don’t you Garrison guys ever give up?”

Well, we assured him that we were not strictly speaking garrison guys at that point. And then he um he proceeded to tell us the ins and outs of that feud, right? And how there had been an attempt to firebomb his house, you know, and he had been more or less thrown out of his own church. Not that he was the preacher, but he was a I guess founder or leader of a uh church there in Los Angeles, right? And um you know, and and how he had been feuding with people like Adelot Thornhill and um Yeah, you’re right. Yeah. Well, there was even a lawsuit. They were they were suing each other as well. There was a big lawsuit going on. Oh, I know. I went and I’m thinking in 1971 I went to LA and yeah attended one of the court sessions in that lawsuit. Oh really? Wow. Yeah. Carol uh Inelot and Tom Thornley were out in the hallway. I guess if they looked at me they they perhaps didn’t recognize me from meeting me in ‘ 68. Dennis Mau was there with them. Okay. Yeah, of course he was the young fellow who had supposedly known about a uh rattling plot to kill Kennedy in LA in 1960. Am I right, I think. And that’s when he was like 14 years old or something. I was Yeah. 15, 14, right? Um but I didn’t actually I never met Mau, but I did see him because he was there. And then I sat in the courtroom with the with Bradley or near Bradley and yeah that was yeah eventually he won the suit and was awarded $1.

I he suffered all kinds of personal uh u difficulty and uh you know he was a u reserve deputy sheriff and when Hubert Humphrey visited LA in 1968 he was told you know we we don’t want you in on any security arrangements concerning Humphrey’s visit because if something happened to Humphrey you know and you were there uh it would be you know terrible. So it did that was one way it affected him but of course his reputation suffered. He talked about going in a store once and you know the proprietor you know when they found out who he was said and oh are you’re the guy that killed Kennedy. Yeah. He had to suffer through that. Now, in uh August 68, Fred Nukem and I went to Edgar Eugene Bradley’s house again and we had a sitdown interview with Jerry Patrick Heming and Lawrence Howard and that of course Patrick Heming um dominated the conversation to the point where I don’t remember anything that Howard had to say, but Right. P Jerry Patrick Heming of course is, you know, well known as having been a a teller of tall tales and a and a blabbermouth and and somebody you know that you just really had to ask yourself uh what what what has he said that is true or you know he he he he told us for example you know that he met Oswald in LA or rather a suburb of LA in 1959 right Oswald was a murdered um El Toro at the at the home of the uh Cuban council in LA. You know, he had very interesting stories, but that was kind of uh a unique I thought it was kind of a unique place where we would end up interviewing Howard and and Heming at Edgar Eugene Bradley’s house. Fascinating. I mean, my my favorite Heming story is this the year that he he he u he was on a panel at JFK Lancer, the conference in Dallas, and he was so rambling and incoherent that everybody started laughing and there’s a write up on the web of that of that session where they just can’t believe just like how, you know, this guy’s completely incoherent, you know, just making up these stories. It was it was quite a funny little writeup. between 68 and 71, I met Bradley on several different visits to LA, you know, and and he was a very personable guy. Uh seemingly, you know, very sincere and uh it was a, you know, I had a whole different take on him, of course, than the one I had when I first went to LA. And all I knew was Garrison has had this guy arrested, you know, and wow, I’m in the same city as Edgar Eugene Bradley. I didn’t even know him. But what I did know him, of course, are and and he he went on being uh in in associated with Fred Nukem. I think Fred testified I I’m not sure about this, but I think Fred testified at his uh tri at the trial, you know, when he sued Okay. Bible. He was going originally to sue other people. Yeah. As well. I think Mark Lane. I have I have a copy of of like the four-page uh suit against Mark Lane. Yeah. But I don’t I don’t know. I assume it didn’t really go anywhere. Yeah. I didn’t meet Mark Lane until 71, but Well, it’s it’s it’s just it’s f I mean fascinating. I mean, I really feel for Bradley. I mean I when I point out to people that you know Garrison I mean I mean he made a he charged Bradley with with conspiracy to to assassinate Kennedy and then like oops I made a mistake. I mean that’s it’s quite a mistake to make. Yeah. Yeah. Um Bradley told me once that he was visiting the Pacific Northwest and dropped in on Fred Chrisman uh after this was all over. It would have been, I think, between 68 and 70. And I guess they had a I would have loved to have been there for that. I guess they had a chat, you know, where they compare notes on what it’s like to be a garrison suspect. So, you know, this is all amazing material. What So, tell us a bit about Fred Chrisman and and and that part of your work uh for the for the Garrison investigation. Yeah. Well, I occasionally got asked to do something to look into Chrisman. Uh, we had kind of a division of labor in that up in the Seattle Tacoma area. Uh, Ed Jeffs who covered Chrisman as a reporter, you know, for the Tacoma News Tribune. Uh, so Eds and George Rener. Um, my two uh, comrades up there. I hope the word comrade doesn’t get misinterpreted. uh in in the committee they they hand did most of the investigating of Chrisman and um I did the wheat into things, you know, because by by mere chance I guess um you know we organized the committee of inquiry before either Weat or Chrisman had actually been subpoenaed. They were not yet subpoenaed as witnesses by Garrison. So, and then it just so happens that Chrisman crops up in Ed and George’s backyard, so to speak. And then a few months later, uh, or excuse me, earlier, um, Wheat, who lived just outside the town where I lived in Oregon, uh, got subpoenaed. So, we were both kind of, uh, lucky to be so close. some of his characters and so but occasionally I would get asked to do something or I would talk to people about Chrisman. Uh like I went to Veil, Oregon where he went to high school and I talked to a couple of people there who knew him. Uh another occasion I u was asked to look into some gypsy who uh was supposed to be tied up with uh with Chrisman, right? And this lived in Oregon. So I I kind of got the Oregon end of the Chrisman um u detective work. Yeah. And well, didn’t he have a house in Oregon or his wife his wife or his wife’s father had a house in Oregon? Well, his father, Fred Chrisman, Senior, right, uh lived in Portland and um had raceh horses. He had a, as I understand it, a concession at the racetrack there. And yes, he does seem to have had a ranch or farm. Now, that got made into a big deal. And that’s what brought Fred up the coast from LA in July 68 after uh Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy had been assassinated. Fred wanted to leave the country for a while. He just, you know, couldn’t put up with it. He wanted to go to Canada to Vancouver Island and just get away from America and Americans for a while, which he did. But on the way up, he stopped and visited me in Clamoth Falls, Oregon. Right. Yeah. Out of the blue, I got a knock on the door one day after after I came home from the base. And here’s Fred Nukem in a, you know, with a beard wearing sandals and I was there in my Air Force uniform. So, we kind of made a contrast. And but we really, you know, warmed up to each other very quickly and we went out to dinner together. I I took him out to the wheat place after wheat disappeared for parts unknown. The house he’d been living in, an old school house, burned to the ground. And I I would imagine he was the one that burned it, right? But um yeah, so I took I took the Nukems out there and showed him that. So um and then Fred kept going up the coast on the way to Vancouver Island and uh stopped to see George and Ed or you know and then on his way back I was in Seattle. So we all had another little reunion then. But yeah, Fred uh was sent up north uh as kind of a u side to his heading for Vancouver Island to look into Chrisman. And he did find a Chrisman farm in u the rural part of Oregon west of Portland. Well, I I have to laugh because Garrison Babe, pardon? No. Well, Garrison was the one who wrote a a memo to the HSCA saying, you know, look, isn’t it strange? Shaw went to Portland after San Francisco after the assassination. And guess what? You know, uh, Chrisman has a farm or his father has a farm out there. Isn’t that strange? Yeah. And one rumor had it that uh G. Clinton Wheat fled to that farm before he went back down to Chasta County, which I think is ridiculous, right? Yeah. And another version was that there were uh Sato masochistic parties or something that went on there. I mean there there were rumors uh going around about the Chrisman farm or the white farm uh you know that never of course had any uh any real basis but but yes his father does seem to have had a farm. And so Chrisman was involved in the sort of the Mory Island uh hoax. Yeah. 1947. Do you want to talk a bit about that or you had recently I know as a guest Adam Golitlightly? Yeah. And he mentioned my name I two or three times. I I’ve been trying to uh do some research that might be helpful to him. And uh yeah, Maui Island of course was this case where Fred Chrisman and another guy named Harold Doll, you know, supposedly reported um these doughnut shaped flying saucers going over Doll’s boat out in Puget Sound near Mauy Island and dropping debris on the boat that killed the dog and injured uh Doll’s son. And then a couple of early UFO spotters, Kenneth Arnold and Amil Smith, came to Tacoma. Arnold had been hired by Ray Palmer, you know, who was a publisher of Amazing Stories and Flying Saucer Magazine and Fate magazine later, right? Uh Palmer paid um Arnold to go there to look into Mari Island and Arnold recruited Smith to come with them. And then um and they had discussions with Chrisman and Dah. And then a couple of uh at their behest, a couple of Air Force uh UFO investigators from Hamilton Air Force Base in California flew up in a B25 and talked to Chrisman Adall and supposedly got a hold of some of these fragments and then the two the two officers Davidson and Brown in flying back their their B25 crashed and they were killed. So that’s kind of the whole thing in a nutshell. Of course, it was written off by the FBI and the Army Air Force as a hoax. It got a lot of newspaper publicity, particularly after the B25 crash. Yeah. Um, I think what separate, you know, I’ve asked myself, what makes Mari Island unique, if anything in that early period where there were UFO sightings and other hoaxes going on all over the country, but particularly in the West Coast. And I guess what stands out is number one, it had this dramatic element to it. This kind of sci-fi approach to what happened that none of the other UFO sightings had. They were all just visual sightings of shiny things uh or bright things in the sky. Here you had donutshaped flying saucers that were dropping debris on people, right? Uh, and you know, so it had this sci-fi element to it that nothing else had going. And and also, um, secondly, oh, by the way, Chrisman was a big fan of sci-fi. Um, I had somebody tell me that he should have been a science fiction writer. uh you know, somebody who knew him uh told me that, but he he perhaps Maui Island was his way of u you know, making some money if they could get their story published and number two, you know, allowing him to be kind of the sci-fi author in a way. The other thing though about Mari Island was the death of the two pilots or or officers, you know, that was just a terrible tragedy. Yes. And again, put a whole different cast on it. It made it a bigger more more uh I guess as uh as Ed Rupel the the project blue book chief later called it. You know he he said it was the second biggest hoax and the dirtiest hoax you know that they ever that ever happened in UFOs. So the deaths just added to the sensationalism and the publicity and all that kind of thing that it got. So it stood out. Yeah, it was tragic. I mean, it’s hard to then to admit, you know, it was a hoax after two people have been killed. I mean, it’s just a it was horrible, horrible thing. Yeah. I met the nephew of one of the pilots or the officers, Philip Lipson and Charlotte Lever, who I’ve known for years. Uh they wrote a book about Mahari Island and then they appeared and I came along at a UFO festival south of Seattle a number of years ago and uh two guests showed up. One was the nephew of one of the pilots and the other was a lady who was Hal Doll’s or Harold Doll’s daughter. But but his Yeah. the pilot the pilot’s uh nephew he he was just very broken up and this is like you know decades later but he just seemed to be very broken up and emotionally affected by uh kind of you know reminiscing about that whole event. Yeah. That was really tragic. Yeah. Yeah. Very tragic. And so then Crispen went on and he I mean he he met Thomas Beckham and they they were sort of two characters who got involved in a variety of little schemes. I mean at one point Chris Chrisman even did a UFO conference I think at one point. Oh yeah. He he went to one or two UFO conferences that I know of. Yes. Um yeah, he continued occasionally to try to get some mileage out of the fact that he had been, you know, at the there at the beginning, you might say. And uh he he, you know, he was touted or at least by him or or Harold Dah, you know, as being a kind of like a character out of the Invaders television show and that he was the most knowledgeable guy on UFOs around and so on. So what is the theory? What’s the theory that about Chrisman and the JFK assassination? Where how does how does he supposedly fit into the assassination? after Beckham was subpoenenaed I think in December uh the around the end of 1967 and he was subpoenaed because of his association in New Orleans in the early 60s you know where the anti-cast movement and was supposed to be kind of a knowledgeable guy when it came to people like uh Banister or Yeah or whatnot Jack Martin too. Yeah. So he got subpoenaed, but also there had been letters and contacts from people to Garrison’s office saying, “You ought to look into Beckham.” Beckham after got subpoenaed said, “Uh, gosh, the only time I was ever in Dallas was with my manager.” You know, I I was a country singer, still am, and my manager then was uh Fred Chrisman, and we did make a trip to Dallas, but that was 1966. So he publicly brought Chrisman’s name up uh almost a year before Chrisman got subpoenaed and um somebody in Garrison’s office made a you know had had had noticed an anonymous letter that mentioned Chrisman and Beckham that had been written in I think May 67. So in February 68, Bill Boxley, who was a investigator for Garrison, sat down with Bob Lavender in San Francisco and Lavender met Beckham in Omaha. And then not that long later after Beckham had a, you know, parted company with Chrisman in the Puet Sound area, Lavender shows up in uh in Olympia, Seattle, Tacoma, that area associated with Chrisman. And Lavender told Boxley, you know, all kinds of things uh about Chrisman. There were uh you know the anonymous letters particularly the one from Florida which I think was written in late ‘ 67 it uh you know spelled all kinds of allegations about Chrisman that he knew Klay Shaw that he knew Tippet which is really I think crazy uh that New Orleans dozens of times you know and so on and so forth. all these things kind of piled up and eventually led to uh and then Ed Jeffs who who you know would report on Chrisman in Tacoma um he was investigating and in touch with Garrison’s office and so eventually you know in November 68 uh uh Chris got called as a witness and he he went down to New Orleans and testified and didn’t have anything very valuable to say about anything. And uh you know there are several things about Chrisman though that I think deserve to be brought up. One is he had a very brave and distinguished record as a um Army Air Force pilot in World War II right in the China Burma India Theater. He did, I think, what looks to me like some good work on behalf of the gypsies in Tacoma that really got uh quite a bit of notice and drew attention to the plight of gypsy people, not just there, but across the country. It’s kind of an underrepresentative, ignored, left behind kind of a segment of the population. So, I think he did some good work on behalf of gypsies. I personally don’t consider that to have been a a con job on Chrisman’s part as much as it was, you know, a sincere attempt to help them. And then of course he had a many years as a teacher uh and school administrator you know so he really did some positive constructive things in his life but he would also turn around and get involved in in some dubious activities from time to time. Uh some of which maybe he didn’t even want to get involved in. So tell tell us a bit about um you know the fact Garrison included Chrisman in in the first draft of his book on the trail of the assassins. Yeah. Before that was published he he had Chrisman in there and then uh so he he had contact you know he had trouble getting it published and I think he had contacted you and and Fred Nukem for some help in adding some information about Chrisman. Yeah I had continued to to research Chrisman over the years. I got I met a fellow named Khani Hanohano in Seattle in 1971 at a UFO study group and he after I got out of the Air Force and Colani uh was a had a strong interest in Chrisman. So Colani and I collaborated for many years in researching Chrisman. Um, and uh, you know, in 1978, I was listening on radio to the broadcast on NPR, I think, of the, uh, House Select Committee hearings. Uh, and one day they bring up Chrisman, you know, and their photographic panel had looked at those photos of the tramps, right? You know, one of them could not be ruled out as Chrisman. They couldn’t say definitely it was, but they couldn’t. So I contacted the House Select Committee and ended up talking because they called me back. I think Cliff Fenton, the chief investigator for the House Select Committee. I told Fenton that when I taught high school in Oregon in the mid70s, I met a woman who had been a teacher with Chrisman at Reineer High School. And I, you know, I asked her, “Well, do you remember what went on and so on?” And and she told me about distinctly remembering Chrisman being in high in the high school the day of the assassination. And so I told Cliff Fenton about that. They ended up, as you know, I’m sure, getting u uh you know, affidavits, the teachers that had taught with him and could vouch for that. And of course, even in his book, Murder of a City, that came out in 1970, he said that’s what he was doing. But that hadn’t gotten much attention or that would that been pretty much overlooked. That book wasn’t a bestseller. It wasn’t widely read. Um, so anyway, the House Committee’s report ended up saying, you know, we we were able to exclude Chrisman despite what the photographic panel said. He, you know, he he’s clearly not one of the tramps, right? So, in n in the late 80s, Jim Garrison was working on his book on the trail of the assassins, and he contacted Fred Nukem and asked him if he could help him out in any way with the Chrisman end of his research, which at that time, as you said, was going to be a big part of the book. Yeah. And by that time, you know, he thought Chrisman was a CIA agent. And uh well, Fred turned to me because he knew I had been doing research on Chrisman far beyond, you know, what we did back in the 60s. So I wrote to Garrison and I later had a phone call with him, uh, you know, where I said basically, it’ll do your book more harm than good to put Chrisman in it. Well, on the phone call, Garrison explained to me some of the reasons, you know, we had for wanting to uh finger Chrisman, like the fact that Chrisman taught in a town in Oregon that wasn’t too far from Dallas, Oregon, where Larry Craford was from originally. And it was kind of like, yeah, but not even at the same time. um you know so he gave me some very weak reasons. But one thing that you had a a uh installment of your blog cover was was something that I independently arrived at myself and that was that Garrison thought Chrisman because he’d worked at Boeing represented this conglomeration of aerospace companies that was behind the assassination. Right. Yes. Yeah. in the late ‘ 68 that that was a big revelation for Garrison that aerospace companies like General Dynamics or Lockheed or North American or Boeing in particular uh you know that some group of those companies uh I don’t need I don’t mean to indict all of them that was his bag but uh you know he really thought that was who was behind the assassination and Chrisman was obviously uh still working for Boeing. Yeah. In fact, he worked there from 60 to 62 in the personnel department. I I talked to a woman who had worked in the personnel department back when Chrisman was there and she told me that he had a pretty mundane job and um you know, it definitely didn’t involve u any cloak and dagger kind of stuff that Garrison described to it. Well, I spoke I spoke to uh the publisher I think apprentice hall, one of the companies that turned down Garrison’s book and I spoke to him and he basically said one of the problems was that Garrison had promised all this information about Chrisman and the CIA and nothing materialized and that was one of his chief reasons for turning down the book. Yeah. I found on the internet and and you may have done so as well the actual letter from the editor or publisher. Yeah. Explaining that to Garrison. Yeah. That that what you just have the material you have on Chrisman is just too weak. So it turned out back when I talked to Garrison, of course, I had no idea that that was happening. So, it turns out my call to Garrison wasn’t the only or even an important reason why he dropped Christmas in the book, but maybe it had a little bit to do with it. I don’t know. Well, I’m sure it had a lot to do with it, but uh perhap what I don’t know is is did uh didclar, who is the editor of his book, did he also help uh or take, you know, tell Garrison to take out Chrisman? Okay. I I don’t know the answer to that. I mean, the the scar papers are locked up in the AARC, and I’m just dying to get to look at those papers, which might tell us more about um the editing of Garrison’s book. You bet. Well, there’s so much we know and even so much more that we don’t know and would like to, you know, and it’s a shame that we don’t have access. But, of course, it would take a hundred people a lifetime of work to to go through a lot of what’s out there that that we unfortunately uh don’t have the time to look at or or have access to. Yeah, I’m I’m hoping that the ARC does digitize a lot of their stuff because they have an awful lot of interesting material um that’s just sort of sitting there in like they have like five different warehouses um in the DC area. So, I’m I’m wish they would digitize it. Well, right. or as another example of what’s sitting around somewhere, I hope, you know, is the uh 40 filing cabinets and stuff that David Lifton accumulated because I don’t think everything in it would be garbage, you know. No, I’m sure he had a lot of Garrison material and he had all sorts of stuff, letters from other other researchers and Oh, yeah. and the results of interviews that he did. Yeah. Some of which he never mentioned in print. Yeah. I know. Oh, I mean that that stuff is somewhere and I’m I wish somebody would digitize it. I I can tell you that somebody is now digitizing Gayan Fon’s records. Mhm. Which is I have like a banker’s blocks full of correspondence with Lifton. Okay. He was, you know, I only met him once in my life, but uh 25 years ago or so, you know, we kind I I became in close contact with him again. And for years, you know, he would share and I was, you know, not always convinced by what he was sharing, but uh I I enjoyed knowing him. I enjoyed knowing Lift. Yeah. I I had one phone call with David Lifton and and uh I had called him in Las Vegas. I wanted to talk about the the the question whether uh General Lameé was at the autopsy. And it was a very very it was a fun conversation with with David in his apartment. There was only one small space where he got good cell reception. And so if he moved slightly, he would lose connection. At one point we did lose connection. And he immediately sent me an email. Call me right back. And I called him back and we spent over an hour on the phone. He was reminiscing about, you know, the different different uh publishing companies that took on best evidence. And it was a bit of a reminiscing time for him. I think, you know, he appeared to me a bit lonely or wanted somebody to talk to. Yeah. I had a lot of long conversations with him or conversations that would come at late pretty late at night for me and uh it was always enjoyable to talk to him. Uh and he yeah he would reminisce quite a lot. So, just uh you know, we don’t have that much time left, but can you tell us a bit about your um your work in the military uh on investigating UFOs? Sure. Yeah. I was stationed at Kingsley Field, an Air Force base in uh Clamoth Falls, Oregon for three years. And um it wasn’t long after I got there that they decided that I ought to be as a you know brand new second lieutenant with not enough work I guess to do. Uh that in addition to my job as base disaster preparedness officer that was my main duty there for three years. They would make me the uh UFO project officer for the base. And that meant that u I would investigate in the field UFO reports that arrived from people generally in the southern Oregon northern California area because we were very close to the California border. We were kind of what I thought of as the greater Mount Shasta area in the manner of speaking. So, and a few months went by before I got my first uh report to look into, but over a period of time from 68 on, and of course, this was for project blue book. So, I would send reports to them and also to the Condan Committee at the University of Colorado, which was investigating UFOs under an Air Force contract. And some cases I investigated I didn’t report because they just didn’t seem to have anything to go by. You know, like somebody saw a little light in the sky going over at night, which could be anything, right? So, I would talk to them and then I would, you know, and take the written report. they’d fill out a form and you know then I would decide not to send it into project blue book because they wanted something that was more sub you know sub had some substance right so um every few months on average I would get a report uh and I think maybe twice I sent in a report in writing you know or by fax to um to project blue book and the conan committee And then after the con or after the project blue book was shut down in December 69, a few months went by. And in April 70, I got another report. At that point, I decided, well, I may not be working for Project Bulbick anymore, but I’ll go investigate it anyway. It was a report by a couple of Air Force sergeants of what they thought was a landing of a UFO on a mountain in Northern California. That turned out to be very interesting. Um, they were good witnesses. They they showed me a picture that they made of the UFO that looked very interesting, right? It it looked a lot like a picture I’d seen of a UFO in France. And um I had a geer counter with me and a Polaroid camera. And when I took a photograph of what they said was where the UFO landed, you know, with a Polaroid camera, you’d pull the thing out and then you could watch it develop, as you may remember. Yep. Yeah. So, I’m looking at this photograph, visualize in front of my eyes, and what I’m looking at is the sergeant off in the distance, trees and logs, and then what looked like flames of fire coming out of the ground. I thought, you know, now that may have been an anomaly of the film. I I totally recognize that in retrospect, but you can imagine my reaction and looking at this photo and seeing what I couldn’t see with the naked eye that looked like fire coming up, right, from the ground. But so that turned out to be very interesting. But I had nobody to report it to. Project Blue didn’t exist anymore. So um I just put it in my file, which I still have. I still have my file of all my reports and notes and photos and things like that because otherwise I would have just it would have gotten thrown away, right? Project blue ended. So, what what do you make of the current activity with UAPs that’s going on right now? I you know, I don’t know really what to make of it. It’s kind of bewildering. Um, I never been much of a believer in u in the actual existence of of some kind of alien hardware flying around in our skies. So, uh, even though I have a interest in flying saucers that goes back to my real really back to my childhood, I was a regular reader of Fate magazine as a teenager and I bought books about UFOs back when I was maybe 10 or 12. And as I Yeah. So I had this long history of interest in UFOs. But when I actually started investigating them, I found that the witnesses were very reputable, credible people. But my the difficulty is how do I as the investigator establish what it was they saw or even really for sure what it looked like or how it behaved, right? So they would draw me diagrams and give me a description, but then you know it was a case of do I really think this is truly unidentified? Um I’ve got some statistics here. the two years uh 1968 and 1969.

Um 68 there was only project rule book only uh categorized three sightings that whole year as unidentified and then in ‘ 69 only one. So, I came in at a point where Project Blue Book was treating very very few UFO sightings as being truly unidentified. Um,

for what? Well, I’m I’m just amazed that like Luna has her hearings uh in Washington and then she she actually was on Joe Rogan show claiming that our advanced technology today is because of of aliens. I mean, it’s just it’s I I couldn’t believe she actually said that. And uh Well, I can believe she said it, but I can’t believe it’s true.

That’s true. Yeah, you’re right. Yeah. Well, yeah, go ahead. Oh, well, yeah, go on to another topic if you have time. Yeah. I mean, I think what I’d like to do is just sort of um there’s so much more to talk about. I mean, I’d just like to get your thoughts on the current state of JFK assassination research, what you think about the assassination today, and how that’s changed over the years. I It’s a just a generally broad topic. Well, I think I’ve grown more skeptical over the years, you know, about many of the claims that are made, the conspiracy theories and so on. I’ve decided now that I’ve got to a certain point in life that I would like to be neutral on the subject of the JFK assassination. I know that’s a way of probably alienating everybody else who has any interest in this subject, but I’d kind of like to take the stance that I’m neither pro- conspiracy theory nor totally anti-conspiracy theory because I think there is some uh possibility, you know, kind of thinking from an epistemological viewpoint that we don’t know quite enough to be able to say flatly that there was no conspiracy of any kind. Um Oswald might have conspired with the groundkeeper at Daily Plaza, you know, so that that guy would make his lawnmower backfire and be a distraction as Oswald fired the shots. I’m not saying that happened. Please don’t get that. I’m saying that would be But that kind of conspiracy, of course, would thrill no one. No one would knock themselves out for decades trying to prove that kind of conspiracy. It it just wouldn’t rise to the level of what would make people who believe in a conspiracy happy, right? Yeah. But on the at the same time, some kind of low-level conspiracy that doesn’t have to include everyone and their brother uh or every, you know, every letter agency of the government. uh you know you can’t rule totally 100% with 100 you know moral conviction rule that out and I don’t imagine um the uh you know what I’m saying is going to make some people happy but uh on the other hand the conspiracy theories that have come along you know the the the thing is to look at them each in turn and see what’s wrong with them and there’s always something wrong uh or there’s always something lacking or something more that I’d like to see before I would buy into them. So individual conspiracy theories I have yet to be convinced. Um, but you know, I think debunkers, if you want to use that term, it’s really kind of a unpleasant term in a way, you know, like UFO debunkers. But, um, you know, the the people that that the conspiracy theorists would would despise as being debunkers are really doing the conspiracy theories a service as cons, you know, being critics of what they do. Uh it’s setting up guard rails. It’s saying, “Look, if you want to have a decent conspiracy theory, don’t do this or don’t bring up that, right?” But, you know, uh uh yeah, kind of narrow your thinking and try to weed out the garbage and the untruths and the mistakes that you’re making and then see what you have left and maybe build on that. Um yeah, I totally agree. I totally agree with that. I’m surprised that more conspiracy believers don’t do some of that work. Um, policing themselves. It’s it’s very important. The other thing I would say about a possible conspiracy is I think the one thing that I don’t know about is was somebody egging Oswald on that we don’t know about in Jim Host thought so. You know, Jim Hosty, who I got to know back in 1983 when he came and talked to my uh JFK assassination class in Kansas. He came on two different occasions and and spoke at link both times. I also met him once at his home and we talked on the phone and corresponded for years after that. Um, you know, he talked about the Castro regime murder mount. That’s the way he put it. that he thought that perhaps not with intent as far as Oswald was concerned, not that they were particularly addressing him, but you know, he was just influenced by and egged on in a way by the rhetoric that was coming out of Havana. Now I think eventually Hosty went a little bit further than that because in his book Assignment Oswald, you know, he says in in a he makes an assertion that I think has gotten very little if any attention. He asserts in Simon Oswald that Oswald was photographed in Mexico City on a street with Kikakov.

I think by the time he wrote ASSIGNMENT OSWALD which was like around 10 years after I met him,
he brought that up which he had never mentioned to me but you know so I think Hostie over time became a conspiracy theorist but thought that it was the Cuban and or the Russian uh governments that were behind it. Right? more than just Oswald picking up something from the news that Castro may have said. Yeah. Castro did it theory was also bought into by other people like um you know two men that in ‘ 63 were very much involved in Cuban affairs in the department of the army were Alexander Haig and Joseph Calfano. and they both expressed over the years their conviction that Castro was behind the assassination. And uh I don’t know that we can totally rule that out. Also Gus Russo’s theory about uh Oh yes, Gus Russo. You bet. Yes. Yeah. And we I guess we normally think of him as being anti-conspiracy, but on the other hand, he he certainly uh did some intriguing research on the on the Castro angle. Yeah, very much so.
Okay, look, I think there’s a lot more we can talk about in this. We’ll we’ll probably have to do another interview at another time, but thank you very much for session.
It was a lot of fun.
Thank you very much

Delusion Episode 23, Adam Gorightly

www.mattkprovideo.com/2025/09/09/delusion-episode-23-adam-gorightly/

Fred Litwin’s website: www.onthetrailofdelusion.com

Adam Gorightly’s website: http://www.historiadiscordia.com

TRANSCRIPT:


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:

Delusion, Episode 23, Dan Evans

www.mattkprovideo.com/2025/08/29/delusion-episode-23-dan-evans/

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.

www.tripadvisor.com/AttractionProductReview-g55711-d12613780-JFK_Assassination_and_Museum_Tour_with_Lee_Harvey_Oswald_Rooming_House-Dallas_Texas.html

Episode 20, Janet Bannister

www.mattkprovideo.com/2025/08/18/episode-20-janet-bannister/

On the Trail of Delusion, Episode 20, Janet Banister

Guy Banister’s great niece and host of the true crime podcast “Skeletons In The Closet,” discusses her great uncles legacy and reputation.

Fred Litwins website: http://www.onthetrailofdelusion.com

Janet Banister’s website: https://www.dapperjackalopemedia.com/

Music by: Power Music Factory Channel URL : / powermusicfactory

B-Roll clips for Yarovskaya /Moricet Episode

www.mattkprovideo.com/2025/06/20/b-roll-clips-for-yarovskaya-moricet-episode/

Some motion graphics and B-Roll shots I hope to use in the next episode of “On The Trail of Delusion”

Created with Adobe After Effects and Photoshop.

The next episode of ON THE TRAIL OF DELUSION will have interviews with Canadian JFK expert Dennis Moricet and acclaimed film maker Marianna Vera Yarovskaya .

https://mayfilms.com/

On The Trail of Delusion, Episode 17, Michel Gagne

On The Trail of Delusion, Episode 17, Michel Gagne

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

okay so I’m going to stop the

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

On the next On the Trail of Delusion… April 2025

On the next episode of Fred Litwi’s “On the Trail of Delusion… “April 2025

An April Fool’s Day prank made with Photoshop, Adobe Animate, After Effects and Adobe Premiere.

Obviously, this is a joke video not really connected to Fred Litwins ongoing YouTube series.

www.youtube.com/@onthetrailofdelusion

onthetrailofdelusion.com