What's the cult you don't recognize as a cult? The one you belong to.
People like Carlson, on both sides belong to a cult. Not the same one but the same thinking. They "see things" and "notice things" that others don't. Why? They all think they are the smartest people in the room, any room. What they don't realize is that when they are alone and no one else is in the room they aren't the smartest person in the room.
The real question isn't who, it's why? What did Oswald hope to gain or get out of it? Did he think he'd get away to Cuba? That he would be lionized by whomever he wanted to lionize him? Castro? The Russians?
Oswald wasn't a trained anything. The KGB would have spotted him as a loser very early on. Castro? Probably the same. The one thing that Oswald didn't have was deniability. He went to Russia, came back with a Russian bride, who he beat. The guy had zero credibility of "who me? Why do you think I did it? Yeah, no one would have suspected him.
My guess is people like him have a movie playing in their head. And in that movie they are the producer, director and hero That is the "reality" they see. Latest example is Mangione. Jack Ruby? The same.
The 9/11 hijackers had a purpose. These others? They wanted to be Stars!
If Oswald required help to pull it off, and we had any evidence of that help, then there would be something to investigate.
But there isn't.
This started because no one was willing to believe that Oswald killed JFK because he was a communist and wanted to do it. The Russians kicked him loose because they didn't want to be so directly associated with him. Oswald then reached out to the Cubans. But he didn't get much help from them, if any.
Democrats built up their own conspiracy theory about how it was something to do with civil rights instead, because that fit in better with their worldview.
From what we know, Oswald was a KGB-trained saboteur, not assassin, trained to be a sleeper agent inside the USA. If war broke out, Oswald would be instructed by KGB handlers what to burn or blow up. Instead he freelanced one failed assassination attempt (General Walker) and one successful one (JFK). Johnson as president downplayed the KGB connection because he didn't want to get drawn into a war. The left and the media downplayed it because they wanted to claim a 'climate of right wing hate' drove a committed communist to shoot an anti-communist Democrat. The left's story made no sens,e but the left stuck with it for decades, even to today.
Are we going to ignore Jack Ruby and all the mafia members over the decades who attest to the mafia's role in killing JFK? That's the main source of conspiracy theories. Not that he was a communist.
If there's one thing we know with certainty about JFK and the Mafia it's that the Mafia had nothing to do with Kennedy's assassination. We know this because RFK, then Attorney General, had been bugging all of the Mob hangouts and tapping all of their phone conversations for well over a year by November 22, 1963. There were hundreds of hours of Mob interaction which were studied carefully by the Justice Department in search of possible Mafia involvement in the killing, yet there isn't a hint in any of those conversations that the Mob had anything to do with it.
At this point a moderately paranoid mind thinks, "Aha! They KNEW they were being listened to! They kept all their incriminating talk for other times and places!"
That's an interesting idea, but in listening to those tapes, the Department of Justice got the evidence they needed to run down more than a few big time professional criminals, several of whom died in federal prison.
"I happen to think Lee Harvey Oswald assassinated JFK and that he acted alone, which obviously means I do not believe Watergate was a Coup to remove Nixon before he could reveal the truth of a CIA conspiracy to murder JFK. I believe the evidence against Oswald is overwhelming. But of course I don’t “know” it. I’m willing to admit that it is theoretically possible, though unlikely, that a smoking gun implicating the CIA in JFK’s murder will someday emerge. You may disagree and that’s not only perfectly fine, it’s perfectly American. I’m not here to argue that point. What I am here to do is to point out that no such evidence currently exists and that Tucker Carlson just doesn't have the goods"
This applies to any and all theories about who really killed JFK
I was thrilled recently when I discovered that a golden chestnut of a conspiracy theory from the 1960s which seemed to have died anonymously yet lives, but with considerable cosmetic surgery.
I learned recently that some conniver has published a book which asserts that because The Beatles were musically semiliterate at best, all of their music was written for them by The Tavistock Institute as part of a devilishly wily plan to undermine Christian civilization. This stunned me, because until then I had taken it for granted that The John Birch Society must have known what it was talking about when in the late 1960s it explained that because The Beatles were musically semiliterate at best, all of their music was being written for them by The Kremlin as part of a devilishly wily plan to undermine Christian civilization.
Nice write up. It’s a little depressing to watch society lurch from one crazy conspiracy to the next. The “real” press is at least partially responsible for this by compromising their credibility (see Covid origin for example) and making any crazy theory seem possible.
“Because once we convince ourselves that our own Government is capable of an act of pure evil like the murder of its own President, or that it deposed Nixon to cover up that murder, or that our Government continues to protect JFK’s murderers for its own ends 60 years later, we will be obliged to treat that Government as our mortal enemy.”
But here’s the rub: barely two years after JFK got whacked a standing U.S. president committed troops to South Vietnam after leveling a trumped-up, totally bogus assertion of North Vietnamese aggression, the “Gulf of Tonkin Incident” whereas North Vietnamese patrol boats were alleged to have attacked a U.S. Navy destroyer. The “incident” never took place. Why? Well as the theory goes the MIC were denied their war in Cuba by JFK - why the CIA is alleged to have been in on the whack + the fact JFK was on record as seeking to “dismantle the CIA” (Allen Dulles was a notorious JFK hater) - so the MIC got their war in Southeast Asia. If wantonly sending 58,000+ men to their needless death isn’t “an act of pure evil” then I don’t know what is. My point is the govt has done itself absolutely no favors in their duplicity. They lie, obfuscate, & try to paper over their errors/sins/mistakes. Moreover it doubled down on the whole Iraqi “WMD” nonsense; Iraq never had WMD so what was the point? Yet another Deep State/MIC-inspired war for sport. Same thing in Libya; Gaddafi got scared & came clean, gave up his WMD program after Iraq got hit. Obama/Clinton went after him anyway. HRC is so unhinged she went on a talk show laughing & bragging “we came, he saw, he died!” I mean who does that? Who acts like that?
The USA’s biggest mistake was leaving in place the massive MIC spawned by World War II; after the war it should have been dismantled & dissolved. Instead it went on the hunt for new dragons to slay. Communism was a threat but never @ the level the defense “experts” claimed it to be. Sans the atomic bomb, would the Soviet Union have launched an offensive aimed at the English Channel & sweeping all of Western Europe under the hammer & sickle? Probably but we’ll never know. The war in Korea was as unnecessary as the one in Vietnam. All these “conspiracy theories” (a CIA originated term btw to describe those who didn’t buy in to the “Lone Shooter” official explanation) are self-replicating since the U.S. govt operates @ the sordid level of deceit that it does.
I spent a lot of time writing this.... it's very heavily researched while also being very narrowly argued... and I'm proud of it. I knew I'd get a lot of pushback, even from people who are fans of my Stack, but at the end of the day, I'm OK with that. Respectfully, I'm going to let the piece speak for itself.
Oh for sure. I spent something like 30 years trying to “win” the JFK argument before finally giving up. But the new Nixon wrinkle is so silly I just had to speak up.
I am thankful to read thoughtful, deeply considered essays like yours. I must admit, after the last 5 years, I am personally "ripe for the picking" in terms of conspiracy theories. I recently went down a semi-deep rabbit hole on 9/11 and had to stop (fortunately Lent was upon me at that time and I chose to fast from most of my media consumption and start praying the Liturgy of the Hours - it's been helpful in reprioritizing the way I spend my time). Anyway. I am sympathetic to those similarly vulnerable given the conditions under which we lived during Covid (dare I say, the"Plandemic?"). The low trust in government has been earned, in my opinion, but I would be happy to see that trust rebuilt. While the release of the JFK files doesn't reveal the long-waited "smoking gun," I think it did shed some light on the nefarious conduct of the CIA during that time.
I would argue there is evidence that Watergate was used to get Nixon, but zero evidence it had anything to do with JFK and that such a move wasn't the intention of the CIA. The evidence appears to show that the CIA just wanted to hide its involvement. Woodward and Bernstein took the opportunity to use it to go after Nixon and the CIA was fine with that. It didn't care, so long as its involvement was kept secret. I would refer to John O'Connor's books on the subject.
Every President must deal with the fact that there will be elements within the government who would rejoice in seeing him destroyed by scandal. The way most Presidents deal with this intractable problem is to go to great lengths to avoid committing crimes. My complaint with most of the Watergate discourse (and here I don't mean you, but the general state of the debate) is that people want to quickly gloss over what Nixon did, and what he allowed others to do in his name, in order to complain that it was impolite of his adversaries to notice what he did and use it against him.
One of the things I liked about the books referenced: the author most certainly calls Nixon out for the cover up, but presents very compelling evidence that the operation was, in fact, a CIA op to illegally spy domestically. If you haven't read them, I'd highly recommend.
That said, I couldn't agree more when it comes to people coming to a discussion with "my party, right or wrong" mentality.
DIIK (danmedifIknow) up and down the line on most all the conspiracy theories.
As an example, I had and have always questioned the the JFK assassination narrative as I owned the same model Italian carbine. Mine, a very slow and extremely inaccurate weapon. Oswald's may well have been far better, but thoughts based on mine left me wondering. Again, DIIK.
Watergate? The CIA are honorable men? Who blow up the Nord Stream pipelines? DIIK
Bottom line,at least mine, I assume anything the government, any government, or the media says is a lie until or unless proven otherwise.
You'll get no objection from me. The point of the essay, which is very narrowly argued, is that we shouldn't act on any conspiracy we cannot prove and that we should always be open to the possibility that it is wrong... because doing otherwise is a great way to paint oneself into a corner. In no way should this essay be intercepted as arguing against skepticism when it comes to our government's actions.
What's the cult you don't recognize as a cult? The one you belong to.
People like Carlson, on both sides belong to a cult. Not the same one but the same thinking. They "see things" and "notice things" that others don't. Why? They all think they are the smartest people in the room, any room. What they don't realize is that when they are alone and no one else is in the room they aren't the smartest person in the room.
The real question isn't who, it's why? What did Oswald hope to gain or get out of it? Did he think he'd get away to Cuba? That he would be lionized by whomever he wanted to lionize him? Castro? The Russians?
Oswald wasn't a trained anything. The KGB would have spotted him as a loser very early on. Castro? Probably the same. The one thing that Oswald didn't have was deniability. He went to Russia, came back with a Russian bride, who he beat. The guy had zero credibility of "who me? Why do you think I did it? Yeah, no one would have suspected him.
My guess is people like him have a movie playing in their head. And in that movie they are the producer, director and hero That is the "reality" they see. Latest example is Mangione. Jack Ruby? The same.
The 9/11 hijackers had a purpose. These others? They wanted to be Stars!
I'm ready for my close-up Mr. DeMille!
Cut, Print, and That's a wrap!
If Oswald required help to pull it off, and we had any evidence of that help, then there would be something to investigate.
But there isn't.
This started because no one was willing to believe that Oswald killed JFK because he was a communist and wanted to do it. The Russians kicked him loose because they didn't want to be so directly associated with him. Oswald then reached out to the Cubans. But he didn't get much help from them, if any.
Democrats built up their own conspiracy theory about how it was something to do with civil rights instead, because that fit in better with their worldview.
From what we know, Oswald was a KGB-trained saboteur, not assassin, trained to be a sleeper agent inside the USA. If war broke out, Oswald would be instructed by KGB handlers what to burn or blow up. Instead he freelanced one failed assassination attempt (General Walker) and one successful one (JFK). Johnson as president downplayed the KGB connection because he didn't want to get drawn into a war. The left and the media downplayed it because they wanted to claim a 'climate of right wing hate' drove a committed communist to shoot an anti-communist Democrat. The left's story made no sens,e but the left stuck with it for decades, even to today.
Are we going to ignore Jack Ruby and all the mafia members over the decades who attest to the mafia's role in killing JFK? That's the main source of conspiracy theories. Not that he was a communist.
If there's one thing we know with certainty about JFK and the Mafia it's that the Mafia had nothing to do with Kennedy's assassination. We know this because RFK, then Attorney General, had been bugging all of the Mob hangouts and tapping all of their phone conversations for well over a year by November 22, 1963. There were hundreds of hours of Mob interaction which were studied carefully by the Justice Department in search of possible Mafia involvement in the killing, yet there isn't a hint in any of those conversations that the Mob had anything to do with it.
At this point a moderately paranoid mind thinks, "Aha! They KNEW they were being listened to! They kept all their incriminating talk for other times and places!"
That's an interesting idea, but in listening to those tapes, the Department of Justice got the evidence they needed to run down more than a few big time professional criminals, several of whom died in federal prison.
Probably. Are these mafia members credible?
Ruby certainly doesn't seem to be. To me he seems to have been a wannabe, someone who wanted to be famous.
From the piece:
"I happen to think Lee Harvey Oswald assassinated JFK and that he acted alone, which obviously means I do not believe Watergate was a Coup to remove Nixon before he could reveal the truth of a CIA conspiracy to murder JFK. I believe the evidence against Oswald is overwhelming. But of course I don’t “know” it. I’m willing to admit that it is theoretically possible, though unlikely, that a smoking gun implicating the CIA in JFK’s murder will someday emerge. You may disagree and that’s not only perfectly fine, it’s perfectly American. I’m not here to argue that point. What I am here to do is to point out that no such evidence currently exists and that Tucker Carlson just doesn't have the goods"
This applies to any and all theories about who really killed JFK
I was similarly distressed by the lazy thinking I encountered during the debates about the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki inspired by the release of Oppenheimer. https://open.substack.com/pub/offwingopinion/p/the-atomic-bomb-and-skin-in-the-game?r=1inkh&utm_medium=ios
Ugh… the worst. A lot of it is just edge lording for engagement
I was thrilled recently when I discovered that a golden chestnut of a conspiracy theory from the 1960s which seemed to have died anonymously yet lives, but with considerable cosmetic surgery.
I learned recently that some conniver has published a book which asserts that because The Beatles were musically semiliterate at best, all of their music was written for them by The Tavistock Institute as part of a devilishly wily plan to undermine Christian civilization. This stunned me, because until then I had taken it for granted that The John Birch Society must have known what it was talking about when in the late 1960s it explained that because The Beatles were musically semiliterate at best, all of their music was being written for them by The Kremlin as part of a devilishly wily plan to undermine Christian civilization.
Very well stated. Thank you.
Thanks! (Worked on this one for a very long time)
Nice write up. It’s a little depressing to watch society lurch from one crazy conspiracy to the next. The “real” press is at least partially responsible for this by compromising their credibility (see Covid origin for example) and making any crazy theory seem possible.
Totally agree! And thanks
“Because once we convince ourselves that our own Government is capable of an act of pure evil like the murder of its own President, or that it deposed Nixon to cover up that murder, or that our Government continues to protect JFK’s murderers for its own ends 60 years later, we will be obliged to treat that Government as our mortal enemy.”
But here’s the rub: barely two years after JFK got whacked a standing U.S. president committed troops to South Vietnam after leveling a trumped-up, totally bogus assertion of North Vietnamese aggression, the “Gulf of Tonkin Incident” whereas North Vietnamese patrol boats were alleged to have attacked a U.S. Navy destroyer. The “incident” never took place. Why? Well as the theory goes the MIC were denied their war in Cuba by JFK - why the CIA is alleged to have been in on the whack + the fact JFK was on record as seeking to “dismantle the CIA” (Allen Dulles was a notorious JFK hater) - so the MIC got their war in Southeast Asia. If wantonly sending 58,000+ men to their needless death isn’t “an act of pure evil” then I don’t know what is. My point is the govt has done itself absolutely no favors in their duplicity. They lie, obfuscate, & try to paper over their errors/sins/mistakes. Moreover it doubled down on the whole Iraqi “WMD” nonsense; Iraq never had WMD so what was the point? Yet another Deep State/MIC-inspired war for sport. Same thing in Libya; Gaddafi got scared & came clean, gave up his WMD program after Iraq got hit. Obama/Clinton went after him anyway. HRC is so unhinged she went on a talk show laughing & bragging “we came, he saw, he died!” I mean who does that? Who acts like that?
The USA’s biggest mistake was leaving in place the massive MIC spawned by World War II; after the war it should have been dismantled & dissolved. Instead it went on the hunt for new dragons to slay. Communism was a threat but never @ the level the defense “experts” claimed it to be. Sans the atomic bomb, would the Soviet Union have launched an offensive aimed at the English Channel & sweeping all of Western Europe under the hammer & sickle? Probably but we’ll never know. The war in Korea was as unnecessary as the one in Vietnam. All these “conspiracy theories” (a CIA originated term btw to describe those who didn’t buy in to the “Lone Shooter” official explanation) are self-replicating since the U.S. govt operates @ the sordid level of deceit that it does.
Sunlight is the best disinfectant.
I spent a lot of time writing this.... it's very heavily researched while also being very narrowly argued... and I'm proud of it. I knew I'd get a lot of pushback, even from people who are fans of my Stack, but at the end of the day, I'm OK with that. Respectfully, I'm going to let the piece speak for itself.
No I get it & it is; just pointing out why “conspiracy theories” continue to abound. ;<)
Oh for sure. I spent something like 30 years trying to “win” the JFK argument before finally giving up. But the new Nixon wrinkle is so silly I just had to speak up.
I am thankful to read thoughtful, deeply considered essays like yours. I must admit, after the last 5 years, I am personally "ripe for the picking" in terms of conspiracy theories. I recently went down a semi-deep rabbit hole on 9/11 and had to stop (fortunately Lent was upon me at that time and I chose to fast from most of my media consumption and start praying the Liturgy of the Hours - it's been helpful in reprioritizing the way I spend my time). Anyway. I am sympathetic to those similarly vulnerable given the conditions under which we lived during Covid (dare I say, the"Plandemic?"). The low trust in government has been earned, in my opinion, but I would be happy to see that trust rebuilt. While the release of the JFK files doesn't reveal the long-waited "smoking gun," I think it did shed some light on the nefarious conduct of the CIA during that time.
That's a very thoughtful and self-reflective comment and I very much appreciate your sharing it with me. Cheers, and thanks for reading!
I would argue there is evidence that Watergate was used to get Nixon, but zero evidence it had anything to do with JFK and that such a move wasn't the intention of the CIA. The evidence appears to show that the CIA just wanted to hide its involvement. Woodward and Bernstein took the opportunity to use it to go after Nixon and the CIA was fine with that. It didn't care, so long as its involvement was kept secret. I would refer to John O'Connor's books on the subject.
Every President must deal with the fact that there will be elements within the government who would rejoice in seeing him destroyed by scandal. The way most Presidents deal with this intractable problem is to go to great lengths to avoid committing crimes. My complaint with most of the Watergate discourse (and here I don't mean you, but the general state of the debate) is that people want to quickly gloss over what Nixon did, and what he allowed others to do in his name, in order to complain that it was impolite of his adversaries to notice what he did and use it against him.
One of the things I liked about the books referenced: the author most certainly calls Nixon out for the cover up, but presents very compelling evidence that the operation was, in fact, a CIA op to illegally spy domestically. If you haven't read them, I'd highly recommend.
That said, I couldn't agree more when it comes to people coming to a discussion with "my party, right or wrong" mentality.
Cool, thanks! I’ll check them out. Appreciate the discussion
DIIK (danmedifIknow) up and down the line on most all the conspiracy theories.
As an example, I had and have always questioned the the JFK assassination narrative as I owned the same model Italian carbine. Mine, a very slow and extremely inaccurate weapon. Oswald's may well have been far better, but thoughts based on mine left me wondering. Again, DIIK.
Watergate? The CIA are honorable men? Who blow up the Nord Stream pipelines? DIIK
Bottom line,at least mine, I assume anything the government, any government, or the media says is a lie until or unless proven otherwise.
You'll get no objection from me. The point of the essay, which is very narrowly argued, is that we shouldn't act on any conspiracy we cannot prove and that we should always be open to the possibility that it is wrong... because doing otherwise is a great way to paint oneself into a corner. In no way should this essay be intercepted as arguing against skepticism when it comes to our government's actions.
Carlson is an antisemite too.
The problem with conspiracy thinking is that sooner or later it leads to anti Semitism.
It does often seem to trend that way, doesn’t it?