Sen. Cory Booker speaks for over 25 hours, and Democrats are celebrating, and we talk election results from Florida and Wisconsin. And we cover the assassination of JFK, and why it s so important to remember the man who was killed in Dallas, Texas on November 22, 1963.
00:00:00.000Folks, we've got a lot to get to today on the show.
00:00:02.000We're going to get into Cory Booker speaking for like 25 hours.
00:00:05.000Oh my gosh, Democrats are celebrating!
00:00:06.000And we're going to get into election results from Florida and Wisconsin.
00:00:09.000And we're going to talk in-depth about the assassination of JFK.
00:00:12.000We can get into that like really in-depth today on the show.
00:00:15.000First, yesterday our colleague Matt Walsh testified before the California Assembly on legislation to ban male students from competing in women's sports, which of course is just common sense.
00:00:23.000The fight is not over because of one bad day at the legislature, because it turns out that California said no.
00:00:47.000He was testifying before what appeared to be the world's tiniest committee room.
00:00:51.000It was very bizarre, but he was testifying about a bill that would have said that you actually should only be allowed in the ladies' locker room if you are, wait for it, a lady.
00:01:01.000Here was Matt doing what Matt does best yesterday.
00:01:04.000Compelling women to take part in this untruth is evil, perverse, and predatory.
00:01:08.000If you would use the force of law to compel young girls to use a changing room with a boy, you are yourselves predators.
00:01:52.000Well, the answer in California, by the way, was that they would just continue to deny it, which is why Democrats have been losing nationally.
00:01:57.000This is a major issue, and Democrats have been disconnected from reality.
00:02:01.000That disconnect from reality doesn't mean they'll never win another election.
00:02:04.000Yesterday, there were some election results out of Florida and Wisconsin.
00:02:08.000The election results out of Florida are good.
00:02:10.000The election results out of Wisconsin were not good.
00:02:14.000The election results out of Florida, there were two Districts in which the Congress people either took another job or retired from their district.
00:02:22.000Jimmy Patronus ended up winning that seat, holding it for Republicans.
00:02:25.000And then there was Mike Waltz's district.
00:02:27.000He, of course, is the National Security Advisor.
00:02:28.000His district, Florida 6, is a R plus 30 district for President Trump.
00:02:33.000And Randy Fine, who's a state senator here, ended up winning.
00:02:35.000That was expected to be a pretty close race.
00:02:37.000It turned out not to be a particularly close race.
00:02:39.000I was involved in a tele-town hall that we did just before the election.
00:02:44.000So, I'm not going to say we put him over the finish line, but the reality is that he won by a relatively decent margin in Florida 6. If both of those are holds for Republicans, that is good news.
00:02:52.000The piece of bad news yesterday is that Wisconsin had the opportunity to elect to the Supreme Court of Wisconsin somebody who is going to be the balancing vote on the Wisconsin Supreme Court, which would have been really important because Wisconsin, under Governor Scott Walker years back, pushed forward things like right-to-work legislation that suggested That you actually did not have to be a member of a union to work in particular sectors of the economy, and that those particular sectors could not simply remove union dues from you without your will?
00:03:23.000That could easily be reversed by a liberal Supreme Court.
00:03:26.000Also, that liberal Supreme Court is very likely to redraw the congressional boundaries in Wisconsin, thus adding a couple of Democratic seats to the Democratic minority in the House, which could be enough to put Democrats over the top in the next election cycle.
00:03:39.000All of this despite the fact that Elon Musk put gigantic tens of millions of dollars investments in that Wisconsin Supreme Court election.
00:03:47.000The liberal judge in this particular case, Judge Susan Crawford, secured a victory, obviously.
00:03:54.000The state Supreme Court race was technically nonpartisan, but it set a spending record for a US judicial contest.
00:04:00.000Wisconsin awarded Trump his narrowest state margin in November.
00:04:03.000And the race was closely watched for how swing state voters have digested the 10 weeks since his inauguration.
00:04:07.000It's very difficult to tell, by the way, in special elections how people are actually going to vote in a presidential.
00:04:13.000You can't translate a special election into a good read on either congressional elections or on a presidential election in the future because they're weird.
00:04:22.000Usually only the base turns up and like the base of the base.
00:04:25.000Democrats are trying to suggest that this is the beginning of their comeback.
00:04:28.000Crawford said, I never could have imagined I'd be taking on the richest man in the world for justice in Wisconsin, and we won.
00:04:34.000Now again, she was replacing a liberal justice in Wisconsin.
00:04:39.000Crawford's win means the court keeps that 4-3 liberal majority.
00:04:44.000Crawford won pretty handily with 98% of the expected vote counted.
00:04:47.000She was leading Schimmel 55 to 44. Brad Schimmel was the Republican candidate for the judiciary there.
00:04:53.000In 2023, when the court first flipped, To a liberal majority for the first time in 15 years, the liberal candidate won by about 11 percentage points.
00:05:01.000So again, yeah, I don't think you can read this as a broad national trend, and Democrats still have an uphill battle.
00:05:06.000Speaking of which, they are lacking any sort of real leadership at the top of the Democratic Party.
00:05:10.000So, Cory Booker, who once ran for pre- I know you forgot about that.
00:05:36.000And there was a lot of that yesterday because he spoke for 24 hours.
00:05:42.000He wasn't filibustering anything, by the way.
00:05:44.000This isn't Mr. Smith goes to Washington, where he's filibustering a bad piece of legislation.
00:05:48.000This is Mr. Potato Head goes to Washington, where he decides to set a record in the Guinness Book of World Records for jabbering for the longest period of time.
00:05:56.000Apparently, the question everybody was asking, of course, was the Mike Mulligan question, how does he poop?
00:06:01.000The answer, apparently, is that he dehydrated himself.
00:06:04.000He talked about this, that he didn't eat for like a day before, and then he stopped drinking maybe 10 hours before.
00:06:11.000So he was totally dehydrated and somewhat deranged.
00:06:36.000He popped in those angry eyes and ranted about Trump for like 24 hours.
00:06:40.000To call to the conscience of this nation to say I will not stand for another American to lose their health care for a billionaire.
00:06:48.000I will not stand for another veteran who's dedicated to stopping the suicide of other veterans to lose their job.
00:06:54.000I won't stand for the air quality in my community to be worse because they're letting polluters pollute more.
00:07:00.000I won't stand for the collective assault on the Constitution by a man who even the highest judge in our land A Republican-appointed judge said stop threatening and bullying other branches of government.
00:08:12.000The reason he went for a little over 25 hours, again, like, slow clap for that ridiculous performance by Cory Booker.
00:08:20.000A laughably bad performance by Cory Booker.
00:08:22.000It is like watching a horrifyingly bad high school version of Jimmy Stewart and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, and then everybody cheers at the end.
00:08:31.000The reason he went for 25 plus hours, by the way, is because he wanted to actually outdo Strom Thurmond's 1957 filibuster against a civil rights bill.
00:09:33.000According to the New York Times, Senator Cory Booker, his voice still booming after more than a day spent on the Senate floor railing against the Trump administration, on Tuesday night surpassed Rom Thurmond for the longest Senate speech on record in an act of ASTONISHING STAMINA that he framed as a call to action.
00:10:03.000So good for Cory Booker, equaling the achievement of every small child who won't go to bed at 3 o'clock in the morning and is caterwauling about missing her Barbie.
00:10:11.000Mr. Booker, a New Jersey Democrat and one-time presidential candidate, began his speech at 7 p.m. on Monday, vowing to speak as long as he was physically able.
00:10:24.000In a show of physical and oratorical endurance, he lasted past sunset on Tuesday.
00:10:29.000Assailing President Trump's cuts to government agencies and crackdown on immigration, he ended his speech at 8.05 p.m., 46 minutes, after eclipsing Mr. Thurman's 24-hour, 18-minute filibuster of a civil rights bill in 1957.
00:10:39.000So congratulations to two Democrats on really, really long filibusters.
00:10:44.000He finished by quoting John Lewis, the civil rights hero and congressman.
00:10:46.000He said of Lewis, he said for us to go out and cause some good trouble, necessary trouble to redeem the soul of our nation, I want you to redeem the dream.
00:11:00.000Maybe my ego got too caught up that if I stood here, maybe, maybe, just maybe, I could break this record of the man who tried to stop the rights upon which I stand.
00:11:06.000I'm not here, though, because of his speech.
00:11:23.000Well, Cory Booker, it feels like he's been speaking since the 1990s, and the internet of the 90s promised a democratic virtual world where individuals, not governments or corporations, held power.
00:11:33.000Big tech dominates our digital lives with companies not just serving ads, but potentially influencing political choices through controlled content delivery.
00:11:40.000The original internet promised personal freedom and control over your information journey.
00:11:44.000There's a way to reclaim that control and freedom, ExpressVPN.
00:11:47.000When you browse the internet, your service provider tracks everything you do, building a profile that data brokers sell to advertisers and government agencies.
00:11:53.000This constant surveillance means we're being watched and manipulated online.
00:11:56.000With ExpressVPN, my entire online traffic flows through secure, encrypted servers, preventing even my internet provider from monitoring my activities.
00:12:02.000I can browse freely, without surveillance.
00:12:04.000ExpressVPN is great whenever I'm traveling.
00:12:06.000I was on the road yesterday, I was at an airport, I was using ExpressVPN because my Public Wi-Fi means somebody could be monitoring what you do.
00:12:13.000ExpressVPN also masks your IP address, the digital identifier that companies use to track and manipulate your online experience.
00:12:56.000Well, unlike other tax resolution firms, Tax Network USA maintains privileged access to the IRS through their preferred direct channels.
00:13:02.000This means they know exactly which agents can help resolve your case effectively.
00:13:05.000Whether you owe 10 grand or 10 million bucks, their team of attorneys and negotiators brings proven strategies to settle your tax issues favorably.
00:13:11.000With over a billion dollars in tax debt already resolved, they have the experience and the expertise to handle your situation.
00:13:16.000Talk with one of their strategists today.
00:14:08.000Senator Booker, I always knew you were a towering intellect and a phenomenal and passionate speaker and advocate, but I did not know your stamina until today.
00:15:25.000Mr. Thurman had sustained himself by sipping orange juice and munching on bits of beef and pumpernickel.
00:15:29.000It was not clear if Mr. Booker had eaten anything on Tuesday, but two glasses of water rested on a desk in front of his lectern.
00:15:33.000He had prepared for the speech by fasting for days, he told reporters on Tuesday night after the speech.
00:15:37.000Before he began on Monday, he had not had food since Friday or water since Sunday.
00:15:41.000The approach took its toll, said Mr. Booker, a vegan and former Stanford football player who has chronicled his efforts to stay fit and eat healthy.
00:15:47.000Instead of figuring out how to go to the bathroom, he said, I ended up, I think, really unfortunately, dehydrating myself.
00:15:53.000During the speech, you recalled, he really started to cramp up.
00:15:55.000I'm sorry, he wasn't running a marathon, guys.
00:16:05.000And the New York Times is cheering him on because, again, they are completely lacking in anything like a heroic moment right now because Trump is just running roughshod over them.
00:16:14.000Senator Chris Murphy, another clown from Connecticut, He said it's a stunning biological feat.
00:16:19.000Okay, can we, like, a stunning bi- Is he a triathlete?
00:16:23.000He stood there and he talked for 24 hours.
00:18:38.000That if President Trump starts to see negative effects of the tariffs that are affecting his presidency and the economy, then he's going to just back off of them.
00:18:44.000Two, their view that they need to see more signs the economy is actually in trouble before they bet on a recession.
00:18:49.000And three, a belief that as we get more information, there will be more certainty in the markets.
00:18:56.000In recent days, according to the Wall Street Journal, analysts at Goldman Sachs forecast the effective U.S. tariff rate would rise by 15 percentage points this year, subtracting a little more than a percentage point from economic growth, partly through its tax-like effect on consumers.
00:19:08.000That bank now sees a 35% chance of recession over the next 12 months, up from 20% previously.
00:19:14.000But again, everything is sort of up in the air at this point.
00:19:17.000The White House continues to preach confidence about whatever tariffs are going to come out.
00:20:56.000That is a great way to get other countries to do that sort of thing.
00:21:00.000And that's what I'm hoping that Trump is doing here.
00:21:01.000It's leverage to get everybody else to lower their tariffs.
00:21:04.000According to the Times of Israel, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich on Tuesday signed a directive to scrap all remaining tariffs on all imports from the United States with immediate effect in an apparent attempt to win a reprieve from the Trump administration's levy of reciprocal duties expected to be announced on Wednesday.
00:21:17.000I guess the idea is, ain't no reciprocal duties if we ain't got no duties.
00:21:20.000The order was coordinated with Prime Minister Netanyahu and Economy Minister Nir Barkat.
00:21:24.000It's subject to final approval by the Knesset Finance Committee.
00:21:28.000The EU is taking a totally different approach, which is we're going to tariff the living crap out of the United States.
00:21:33.000According to Politico, the EU is considering opening up a new battlefront as President Trump prepares to impose so-called reciprocal tariffs on all of America's trading partners on Wednesday.
00:21:42.000Liberation Day, as Trump has called it, would mark the biggest escalation in the trade war he first launched against Canada, Mexico, and China following his January 20th inauguration.
00:21:49.000Universal tariffs soon followed on steel, aluminum, and then on cars.
00:21:52.000Brussels has so far played by the traditional trade war rulebook, matching Trump's broader tariffs on industrial metals with equivalent levies on iconic American brands like Harley Davidson.
00:22:03.000But now, with Washington threatening to push the EU further, not only for its existing tariffs, but what it sees as non-tariff barriers, like tech regulations, Brussels is preparing to up the ante.
00:22:12.000EEC President Ursula von der Leyen, the European Commission, she said, we'll approach these negotiations from a position of strength.
00:22:27.000Well, they could be thinking of putting tariffs on like JP Morgan or Bank of America or on X or on Google or on Amazon.
00:22:34.000A senior EU official said, quote, we are certainly not excluding a bigger response, a better response and even more creative response through services like intellectual property rights.
00:22:41.000So things could get heavy very, very quickly.
00:22:44.000It remains to be seen exactly what Trump is proposing or what is going to come down the line.
00:22:48.000So we will wait to see that come down later this afternoon.
00:22:51.000Meanwhile, controversy continues over President Trump's immigration plans.
00:22:56.000With regard to the deportations, according to the Washington Post, the Trump administration has transferred 17 alleged gang members to El Salvador, the second such removal in two weeks, as the president pushes forward with his plan to send migrants to a notorious jail in Central America, despite mounting concern over whether he can lawfully do so.
00:23:12.000U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said on Monday a military plane flew the alleged Tren de Aragua and MS-13 gang members to El Salvador on Sunday evening in what he described as a counterterrorism operation.
00:23:22.000And those migrants included 10 Salvadoran and seven Venezuelan men who were previously being held at Gitmo.
00:23:28.000Meanwhile, controversy again has broken out over the case of this supposed Maryland father.
00:23:34.000That's how he was described by The Atlantic.
00:23:36.000Was this guy actually a member of MS-13, an immigration judge?
00:23:39.000So there's credible evidence that he was some six years ago.
00:23:42.000Caroline Lovett was asked about this particular story, as we talked about yesterday in The Atlantic, about a supposedly innocent Salvadoran immigrant Who had to stay on his removal because theoretically he was going to be tortured in El Salvador if he went back.
00:23:57.000And the administration made an administrative error and deported him and now they can't get him back.
00:24:00.000Here's Caroline Leavitt saying, well, it's an administrative error.
00:24:03.000That doesn't mean the guy should be in the United States.
00:24:05.000The error that you are referring to was a clerical error.
00:24:10.000The administration maintains the position that this individual who was deported to El Salvador and will not be returning to our country was a member of the brutal and vicious MS-13 gang.
00:24:23.000Fact number two, we also have credible intelligence proving that this individual was involved in human trafficking.
00:24:29.000And fact number three, this individual was a member, actually a leader, of the brutal MS-13 gang which this person Okay, and she is right about all of those things, presumably.
00:24:50.000You know, more evidence to show who this guy was would obviously help the administration's case.
00:24:54.000But, as we mentioned yesterday, the Atlantic kind of ignored a huge part of the story.
00:24:59.000Meanwhile, Secretary of State Marco Rubio is ordering diplomats overseas to scrutinize social media of applicants for student and other types of visas.
00:25:06.000Basically saying, you don't get in the country if you hate the West.
00:25:20.000So Secretary of State Rubio is pursuing that.
00:25:22.000Meanwhile, Democrats taking the wrong side of an 80-20 issue.
00:25:25.000As always, Representative Jamie Raskin, he's demanding the return of illegal immigrants.
00:25:30.000I call on them to demand that the Trump administration comply with all judicial orders while appealing whichever ones they want to appeal and to demand the return of people unlawfully taken to El Salvador on that so-called plane full of gangbangers.
00:25:47.000and this is gonna make an easy commercial for republicans democrats claiming that we need more people who are suspected or have credible evidence of ties to ms-13 or trendaragua re-entering the united states to make jimmy raskin Feel better about his life.
00:26:02.000Again, President Trump continues to operate on solid bases with the American public.
00:26:07.000The biggest threat to his administration, I will say it over and over and over again until I'm blue in the face, is bad economic policy that leads to a downturn.
00:26:13.000I'm very hopeful that the president today is going to announce tariffs that are less extraordinary in scope than the kinds of tariffs that he is talking about.
00:26:20.000I'm also hopeful that there will come a point Where the President of the United States, if it starts to have a negative effect on the economy in a serious way, starts to back off of some of those policies because what works works and what doesn't doesn't and the proof is going to be in the pudding.
00:26:31.000While protecting your finances is important, even more important is securing your family's future.
00:26:36.000As somebody who always advocates for smart financial planning, I can tell you, having the right life insurance coverage isn't just about peace of mind.
00:26:42.000It's about making sure your family has options if, God forbid, something terrible should happen.
00:26:45.000That's why I need to tell you about PolicyGenius.
00:26:47.000They're not an insurance company themselves.
00:26:49.000They are the country's leading online insurance marketplace.
00:26:51.000They let you compare quotes from America's top insurers side-by-side, completely free, with absolutely no hidden fees.
00:26:56.000Their platform uses real licensed insurance experts who work for you, not the insurance companies, so you can find the best fit for your family.
00:27:01.000With PolicyGenius, you can find life insurance policies starting at just $292 per year for a million dollars in coverage.
00:27:07.000Some options are 100% online and let you avoid those unnecessary medical exams.
00:27:37.000Also, were you ever so intimidated by the complexities of investing or felt you lacked sufficient knowledge about the financial markets, you found yourself continually postponing your first investment?
00:27:45.000Well, April is Financial Literacy Month.
00:28:37.000Acorns Advisors LLC and SEC Registered Investment Advisor view important disclosures at acorns.com slash Shapiro.
00:28:43.000Okay, meanwhile, the House Committee Task Force on the Declassification of Federal Secrets held yet another proceeding on the JFK assassination.
00:28:54.000Now, you ask yourself, why exactly is there another hearing on the JFK assassination?
00:28:58.000And the answer is that the administration put out a new tranche of 80,000 documents that basically added nothing to the case on the JFK assassination.
00:29:08.000Now, as you know, a couple of weeks ago, I got myself in hot water because I said I didn't care about the JFK assassination.
00:29:13.000What I meant by that, pretty obviously, to anyone who was actually listening and not taking me out of context deliberately, was that I know who shot JFK and it's Lee Harvey Oswald.
00:29:22.000The truth is that I was very into conspiracy theories about the JFK assassination maybe 20 years ago, and I did an awful lot of reading about it, and then it turns out that there was no evidence for any of the most prominent conspiracy theories.
00:29:35.000So, yesterday, the House Republicans decided they were going to have in Oliver Stone as an expert on the JFK assassination, which is an absurdity.
00:30:07.000And then I started reading pretty much everything I could get my hands on about the JFK assassination.
00:30:11.000And after reading all the evidence I could get my hands on, I came away with Lee Harvey Oswald did it, and he did it alone.
00:30:18.000And so, now when people are trotting out new theories about JFK and the assassination, I have the same feeling about that that I have about somebody giving me a new theory about how that magician pulled a handkerchief out of his thumb.
00:30:28.000Once I know how the trick was done, then it's no longer an interesting trick.
00:30:32.000And so, the Oswald assassination of Kennedy takes on the same historic importance as the assassination of, say, Abraham Lincoln, or the assassination of William McKinley, or the assassination of James Garfield, or the attempted assassination of Gerald Ford twice, or the attempted assassination of Ronald Reagan, or the attempted assassination of Donald Trump.
00:30:49.000By the way, there's still more questions about the attempted assassination of Donald Trump than I have questions about the assassination of JFK at this point.
00:30:56.000And yet, still, the Republican members of Congress Mr. Stone,
00:31:17.000you wrote a book accusing LBJ of being involved in the killing of President Kennedy.
00:31:28.000Did these did these most recent releases confirm or negate your initial charge?
00:31:37.000Being involved in the assassination of President Kennedy No, no, I didn't if you look closely at the film that there's no it it accuses the President Johnson of Okay.
00:31:55.000Of being part of a complicit in a cover-up of the case.
00:32:01.000Mr. Morley, I think you had something to add on that.
00:32:03.000I think you're confusing Mr. Oliver Stone with Mr. Roger Stone.
00:32:28.000I don't think that Oliver Stone should be a credible source on pretty much anything, because I don't know his historical bona fides on these things.
00:32:55.000It was an act directly tied to the idea of conspiracy connected to crime.
00:33:00.000And so there are lots of conspiracies.
00:33:01.000And the thing about a conspiracy is you can tell when it's happening because of the evidence, which is the thing that you actually should be taking a look at.
00:33:07.000So, for example, when you say that there was a conspiracy from Anthony Fauci and his buddies to silence people who did not take his viewpoint on, for example, the Wuhan virus.
00:33:18.000That is true because there are emails showing that Anthony Fauci did that exact thing.
00:33:22.000When you say, for example, that there was a conspiracy of silence around Joe Biden's health condition, that is obviously true, not just because of your eyes and you watching the media basically cover it up, but because we know from actual contemporaneous and now contemporaneous reporting that everyone around Joe Biden knew exactly what was happening.
00:33:44.000The evidence makes it not a conspiracy theory, but a conspiracy.
00:33:47.000Conspiracy theorists, however, that's a different thing.
00:33:50.000And conspiracy theories are a different thing.
00:33:52.000Conspiracy theories aren't just creeping into the fringe anymore.
00:33:55.000They're staging a full-blown takeover in the public square.
00:33:57.000You've seen it pretty much everywhere.
00:33:59.000You know that we've reached peak absurdity when even Alex Jones, who himself has done a lot of this, is suddenly demanding evidence from certain malefactors.
00:34:09.000Skepticism would be that you question a thing and look for the evidence.
00:34:12.000Not skepticism is where you question a thing and don't look for any evidence before you throw out a theory that is knocked back by the evidence.
00:34:19.000Conspiracy theorizing is not skepticism.
00:34:20.000It is usually intellectual cowardice dressed up as critical thinking.
00:34:24.000And if we don't torch the rhetorical playbook, we end up with a society where the facts are optional, where actual people who know things are mocked, where every basement-dwelling keyboard warrior thinks that fanfiction trumps reality.
00:34:36.000And again, there are people who are in the basement, on the keyboards, who are actually doing real hard good work.
00:34:48.000In order for us to have a functioning polity, you have to have a common set of facts.
00:34:52.000Conspiracy theories are directly tied to no facts.
00:34:56.000So today, I want to talk about how we can tell the difference between a conspiracy, an actual conspiracy, and a conspiracy theory, and what are sort of the hallmarks of somebody who's retailing a conspiracy theory to you.
00:35:07.000This is what I call the QED of conspiracy thinking.
00:35:11.000Q is for fake questions, E is for fake evidence, and D is for fake defenses.
00:35:16.000So this framework is designed to expose the intellectual dishonesty at the core of conspiracy thinking.
00:35:21.000And once you see it, it's difficult to unsee it because you'll see these tactics almost everywhere with regard to people retelling particular narratives.
00:35:57.000Why won't the government discuss the second shooter on the grassy knoll in the JFK assassination?
00:36:00.000Why can't we even talk about the JFK assassination?
00:36:03.000Okay, the question presupposes a premise.
00:36:05.000One, there's somebody trying to hide the truth from you.
00:36:08.000Two, that they're trying to silence you.
00:36:09.000And many of the people who use this kind of stuff are speaking to literally millions of people.
00:36:13.000So, why can't we talk about the JFK assassination?
00:36:16.000Hmm? Well, I noticed you guys are talking about the JFK assassination, or whatever it is you're talking about, in front of millions of people, and nobody's actually silencing you, I noticed.
00:36:24.000They're just asking for the evidence of the thing that you're arguing, and you're not providing the evidence of the thing that you're arguing.
00:36:29.000So, the just asking questions is a rhetorical sleight of hand.
00:36:33.000The tactic puts the burden of proof on the wrong side.
00:36:35.000So, typically, in logical discourse, if I make a contention, I have to Provide evidence of my claim.
00:36:41.000I can't just make a claim and then ask somebody else to disprove it.
00:36:45.000So if I'm going to debate and I make a claim, I should have evidence to back the claim.
00:36:49.000I can't just throw out a claim like, the aliens landed in Area 51. Show me the evidence they didn't land in Area 51. Well, no, the burden approves on me to show they landed in Area 51. It's my job to show the evidence and then challenge the other side to refute it.
00:37:05.000That's how an actual conversation typically works.
00:37:08.000But that's not what's being done here.
00:37:11.000Okay, next tactic in the Just Asking Questions section.
00:37:15.000Okay, this is when somebody who's retailing a conspiracy theory suggests that basically because someone benefits from an outcome or could benefit from an outcome, they're therefore responsible for the outcome.
00:37:25.000And they show no actual connection between the person and the outcome, but if you benefit, then you must have done it.
00:37:30.000So, Lyndon Johnson became president after JFK died.
00:37:36.000That is not In actual logical piece of reasoning.
00:37:39.000It wouldn't pass muster in a freshman logic class.
00:37:42.000Motive may suggest we're to look for evidence, but it is not evidence itself.
00:37:46.000By the conspiracy theories logic, then if you benefit, for example, from a sale at your local grocery store, you must have designed the sale at your local grocery store.
00:37:57.000You benefiting from a thing does not mean that you did the thing.
00:39:09.000Now, of course, this is effective because sometimes people aren't telling you everything and you should do your own research.
00:39:13.000But the thing is, nobody knows everything about complex events.
00:39:17.000The conspiracy theory exploits that gap to insert a preferred narrative.
00:39:21.000So the idea is that do your own research is a way of basically saying, yeah, you don't know as much about this other guy who wrote several books of credible evidence on the thing, but you shouldn't trust him.
00:39:50.000And this is how you structure a conspiracy theory.
00:39:53.000Fake evidence is where somebody who's retailing a conspiracy theory attempts to build a case Using what appears to be evidence, but doesn't stand up to scrutiny like at all.
00:40:01.000So one tactic is cherry picking and secret sources.
00:40:04.000Okay, cherry picking data or claiming secret sources, really great way of doing this.
00:40:08.000So you'll see somebody who's retailing a theory, sees on like a single data point, while ignoring a mountain of evidence that contradicts that theory.
00:40:15.000So they will say, did you know that Trotsky was a Jew?
00:40:19.000And that means that the Sovietization of Russia was a Jewish plot.
00:40:29.000Tons of people in the Soviet infrastructure were not Jews, and even those who claimed Jewish background were not observant Jews in any way.
00:40:36.000But, again, you're not going to hear about any of that because you're cherry-picking that.
00:40:40.000This very often will happen when you're attempting to credit a group with outsized power.
00:40:45.000You'll say, man, have you seen how many Jews there are in Hollywood?
00:40:49.000And it's true, there are a lot of Jews in Hollywood.
00:40:50.000Also, there are a lot of not Jews in Hollywood.
00:40:52.000Also, there are very few religious Jews in Hollywood.
00:40:54.000And you can do this with pretty much anything.
00:40:55.000You just cherry pick one thing and ignore all of the rest of the things.
00:40:59.000As we'll discuss in a moment about the JFK assassination, this is one of the things that you're seeing being retailed on the internet about, did you see that they blacked out Israel?
00:41:06.000They redacted Israel in those 80,000 pages of JFK?
00:41:09.000Yes. Well, it turns out they also redacted Romanian intelligence.
00:41:12.000They redacted Western German intelligence.
00:41:14.000They redacted pretty much all the intelligence agencies.
00:41:16.000But if you don't know that, then it looks like, ah, that is pretty suspicious.
00:41:20.000Okay, so now let's talk about alleged secret sources.
00:41:28.000This person told me, and I believe that person.
00:41:29.000Now, such claims are really unfalsifiable because you can't actually reveal, if you don't reveal the source, how am I supposed to falsify the claim?
00:41:36.000In actual journalism and academic research, you have to have multiple sources that confirm a thing.
00:41:41.000And this is why, by the way, people have become more and more skeptical of anonymous sources, even from legacy media sources, is because it's very difficult to fact-check a claim based on anonymous sources saying things.
00:41:52.000Okay, but it's a great way Of foisting off your claim on a more credible source who you won't even name or describe, because if you describe them, hey, it might let out of the bag what they are.
00:42:00.000You wouldn't want them getting in trouble.
00:42:19.000It is a very basic post hoc ergo proctor hoc fallacy because one thing followed another, therefore the first thing caused the second thing.
00:42:27.000So I wore my lucky socks and my team won, therefore my socks caused my team to win.
00:42:39.000So one of the great kind of problems in our society right now is that the experts have blown themselves out on so many topics, which is absolutely true.
00:42:46.000There are so many people who claim to be experts, On topics, and it turns out that they totally blew it, particularly with regard to, for example, COVID.
00:42:52.000This has opened the door to a bunch of people who will now basically term anyone an expert on a topic.
00:42:58.000And so the appeal to authority is usually a way of finding an authority who has a PhD in an unrelated doctorate, dissertation, jurisdiction, or whatever it is, different topic, and then saying that this person is an expert on this particular thing.
00:43:13.000And claiming expertise is really quite easy in today's modern world.
00:43:17.000You just say you spend a lot of time reading books, you've read a lot of books, and this makes you an expert on the topic.
00:43:21.000Well, if we can't appeal to expertise, and I think that it's fair at this point, in a bunch of ways, particularly on political topics, you shouldn't appeal to expertise.
00:43:28.000You should actually, this is why evidence becomes more important, not less important.
00:43:32.000If you don't trust the experts, then you should ask for the evidence across the board.
00:43:37.000This should be a way of saying, don't cite your authorities, I won't cite my authorities, just bring the evidence.
00:43:42.000That would be a way, but people don't bring the evidence.
00:43:44.000They cite some sort of expert who is saying something out of the box, and I don't know enough to actually question them, you know?
00:43:49.000I don't have to question the narrative, but I don't know enough to question them, and they're an expert.
00:43:53.000That is a cheap and easy way of avoiding responsibility for the theory that you are retailing.
00:44:00.000Another tactic here is overestimating coordination.
00:44:03.000This is usually where conspiracy theories fall apart, because what they'll do is they will posit a vast and complex Secret conspiracy that would require hundreds or thousands of people to be involved in the thing.
00:44:15.000It's sort of like how Copernicus rewrote the rules of how the universe works by discovering how they work because it was simple.
00:44:23.000Ptolemaic theory suggested this very complex system whereby the Earth was the center of the universe and in order for that to work you had to have various sort of spheres and domes and all this kind of stuff.
00:44:32.000And so the theory kept getting more and more and more complex because it wasn't true.
00:44:36.000The same thing is true of most conspiracy theories.
00:44:39.000Most conspiracy theories have to get more and more and more complex.
00:44:41.000So, let's say you believe that the moon landing was faked.
00:44:44.000Okay, that would not require a few dozen people to be in on it.
00:44:46.000That would require thousands, probably tens of thousands of people to be in on it and maintain a perfect lie for literally decades.
00:44:59.000The chances are really good that the friend is going to find out about the surprise party if you have like 20 people at the party.
00:45:04.000Multiply that complexity by a thousand and you don't know any of these people.
00:45:07.000And they're part of a government organization, for example, and you think that nothing is going to leak ever?
00:45:13.000People talk, they make mistakes, they have crises of conscience.
00:45:16.000Usually conspiracies that are successful are relatively small, and then they become open when they're still relatively small and they gain power.
00:45:25.000So, for example, the Soviets, the original Soviet, was a conspiracy of people who were pretty open about their ambitions.
00:45:30.000It started off secret, pretty quickly became not secret, and then they expanded their ambition.
00:45:34.000But the idea that you can have a secret, massive conspiracy involving tens of thousands of people across decades, now you're straining rationality.
00:45:43.000And then there's sort of us versus them thinking.
00:45:45.000This is basically, you label, this isn't even an appeal to evidence at all.
00:45:50.000This is basically you say, if you're in on it, if you're in the know, if you're in the know, then you're us.
00:45:54.000And if you're a credulous dupe and you don't believe us, then you're the them.
00:47:39.000So your defense for not having evidence for your theory or not plausible evidence or not enough evidence or not convincing enough evidence, you have a bunch of tactics you can use.
00:47:49.000The hallmark of pseudoscience, things that are not scientific, And again, there are many things in life that are not scientific, that's fine.
00:47:57.000But, when it comes to claims about the world itself, you should have a falsifiable theory, as Karl Popper, pointing this out, the philosopher.
00:48:07.000Conspiracy thinking is non-falsifiable.
00:48:09.000You structure a claim so it can never be proved false.
00:48:11.000A good theory makes predictions that could be disproven.
00:48:15.000I've asked this to, you heard me ask this about the Derek Chauvin trial to, for example, Stephen A. Smith.
00:48:19.000I said, is there any evidence that could possibly change your mind about this?
00:50:18.000So it goes directly, it's a character attack, essentially.
00:50:20.000It makes the accusation on false survival, because whether you deny or whether you confirm, both take in as confirmation.
00:50:27.000Denial, silence, and confirmation are all the same under the Gafka trap.
00:50:30.000If somebody accuses you of complicity, for example, in putting microchips in the blood of your enemies, and you deny it, Well, you're only denying it because it's true.
00:50:39.000And if you confirm it, it's because it's true.
00:50:41.000And if you stay silent, it's because you won't answer.
00:50:49.000When challenged for evidence, what you will get is a bunch of unrelated gobbledygook facts that are stacked on top of each other super fast.
00:50:55.000That sort of thing is very difficult to combat because it's sort of the equivalent of a terrorist rocket barrage.
00:51:02.000It's a bunch of $50 rockets that are sent up.
00:51:04.000And then it requires $50,000 in Iron Dome to take down each one of those argumentative rockets, and by the time you've done that, they're already firing the next argumentative rocket.
00:51:11.000That has nothing to do with the central argument, but is incredibly time-consuming, and so people just sort of give up defending the truth because it's so tiring.
00:51:23.000Conspiracy theorists excel at weaponizing doubt.
00:51:25.000So, what they will do here is they find a minor error in the official account of an event, and then they're like, okay, well, the entire thing is wrong.
00:51:31.000So they'll say, well, you know, There were initial reports from the government.
00:51:34.000They got the time wrong by five minutes.
00:51:53.000Because usually it takes a while for the truth to be established.
00:51:57.000But what usually happens is people jump to a conclusion.
00:52:00.000That conclusion is then used to discredit the actual truth because somebody made a mistake when they first reported the thing.
00:52:06.000Okay, then there is false equivalence.
00:52:07.000Again, this is a defense mechanism for a bad conspiracy theory where you say all sources are equally biased.
00:52:13.000Sure, my evidence comes from some schlub in a YouTube video who doesn't know anything about the topic and has no credentials and hasn't studied anything, but also the legacy media lies.
00:52:21.000Okay, well, yes, the legacy media does lie.
00:52:23.000That does not mean that all people are equally dishonest or that all cases are equally verifiable.
00:52:31.000You have to actually establish this by the evidence.
00:52:35.000The reality is that people say, oh, I don't, after COVID, I don't trust my doctor.
00:52:39.000I promise you that if you break your leg, you trust your doctor much more than you trust the random guy on the internet who may have been right, by the way, about the COVID vaccine.
00:52:47.000Because the reality is that it depends what you're talking about, depends the topic, it depends the level of expertise.
00:52:53.000Trying to equate everything, to flatten everything is a great way of making everything unfalsifiable.
00:52:58.000Another tactic, the no true Scotsman tactic.
00:53:01.000This is where somebody says, no true conspiracy researcher would deny the moon landing was faked.
00:53:07.000Right? Which allows the community to maintain ideological purity, you just exclude a dissenter.
00:53:11.000You say that person is not actually a member of our community.
00:54:03.000Skepticism is healthy, but a healthy skepticism is rooted in a request for evidence.
00:54:07.000There is a world of difference between evidence-based skepticism and just stringing together random events or stretching the truth beyond what it can bear.
00:54:18.000Skepticism leads to better understanding through a search for actual truth and evidence.
00:54:22.000And if you're not doing that, then you're just entering an intellectual rabbit hole from which pretty much nobody returns.
00:54:27.000So, that QED framework that I just outlined, fake questions, fake evidence, fake defenses, it's a great way to distinguish between legitimate inquiry and the just-asking-questions kind of conspiracy thinking.
00:54:43.000The difference That is how we approach all of this.
00:54:45.000We need to approach all of this with an intellectual rigor.
00:54:49.000We need to actually be willing to change our minds based on actual evidence.
00:54:53.000You have to hold your own side to the same standards.
00:54:56.000And by the way, this is a great way of telling who exactly is lying to you and who is not.
00:54:59.000If people keep insisting they don't need to provide you evidence, they're just asking questions.
00:55:02.000Or if they just retail theories without any evidence to support them, and then use any of the tactics that we've just discussed, it is an excellent way of telling Who actually cares about the truth, and who does not, and who's making money off of you because this stuff tends to go viral, particularly things that confirm your pre-existing bias.
00:55:19.000So the next time you hear somebody throw out a wild theory, maybe the theory is true if they can provide you evidence, and this is what you should ask.
00:55:45.000He's the author of the book, Case Closed, which is the first book that I read that really put to bed a lot of my questions about the JFK assassination and the various conspiracy theories.
00:55:53.000Again, I spent a lot of time on this when I was at Harvard Law School and came to the conclusion it was Oswald, which is why I no longer find this topic all that fascinating.
00:55:59.000But it's fascinating, obviously, to tens of millions of Americans.
00:56:03.000I sat down with Gerald Posner today to talk over Gerald, thank you so much for stopping by.
00:56:13.000So I'm really glad you're taking the time.
00:56:15.000So a few weeks ago, I got myself in very hot water because on my show, I said, I don't really care about the JFK assassination any more than any other historical American assassination.
00:56:24.000What I meant by that is that I actually know who killed JFK, and it was Lee Harvey Oswald.
00:56:28.000And the reason that I don't care about it so much right now is because I know the answer.
00:56:33.000I used to care a lot about the assassination of the JFK.
00:56:35.000In terms of these sorts of various conspiracy theories about who killed him, because if I go all the way back to my law school days, it was dim and dark in Cambridge, Massachusetts in the winter, there was nothing to do, and so I used to go over to the local video store and just rent videos, and so I picked up a copy of JFK, Oliver Stone's JFK, which is a really well-made, insane conspiracy theory.
00:56:52.000And so I watched the movie, and like everybody else, I'm kind of taken in by the movie, and I proceed to read probably five, six books about the JFK assassination, and then I start going deeper and deeper, and then I read your book.
00:57:03.000Case closed about the JFK assassination, and I read the Warren report and all the rest of it, and I came away with the conclusion that it was Lee Harvey Oswald, and so now I don't find it any more interesting or noteworthy than I would any other assassination, in the same way that once you see a magician, how the magician does the trick, then the trick is no longer nearly as interesting.
00:57:24.000I wonder why you think that there is so much continued focus on the JFK assassination, given the fact that the actual evidentiary record is really, really clear, both on a physical evidence level as well as a documentary and witness level.
00:57:36.000And yet this stuff continues to persist.
00:57:39.000The evidence record is is overwhelming.
00:57:41.000The credible evidence on this case in terms of forensics, ballistics, eyewitness testimony, you put it all together.
00:57:47.000And it's a case that you say this is what happened.
00:57:49.000It's Lee Harvey Oswald having killed the president.
00:57:52.000And I understand why you would say, by the way, I'm not at all interested in it anymore, because for you, the case is settled.
00:57:58.000But for most Americans who love the idea, and they've only seen Oliver Stone, they haven't gone on to read books, they haven't read the Warren Commission, they haven't done a little study, they don't have your analytical mind, they didn't go to law school, they're seduced by the idea that there has to be something more to it.
00:58:10.000There's this proportionality bias, the idea that something famous like JFK, this wonderful young charismatic president with so much potential for the future, how could it be cut down by this 24-year-old sociopath, loser-in-life Lee Harvey We're good People
00:58:46.000think that you're dismissing the idea of a much larger conspiracy.
00:58:49.000Why aren't you going after the deep state?
00:58:51.000Why aren't you looking at what the CIA did?
00:58:52.000Why aren't you holding those responsible, Ben, who might still be alive in their 90s and guilty for having killed this young president in the 1960s?
00:59:00.000So people take that as a personal offense to their own judgment about what happened in the case.
00:59:05.000So let's talk about the evidence in the case and why it is that this thing continues to persist.
00:59:13.000As you talk about in your book, you go through a wide variety of the various theories that are put forth.
00:59:17.000Obviously, there are new theories that now crop up all the time, shockingly, ones that were very fringe and now have become quite mainstream on X, on the internet generally.
00:59:25.000I want to go through a couple of them.
00:59:27.000The one that seems to be hot at the moment is the idea that LBJ was behind it, that was made hotter by a purported tape that was put out by Alex Jones and then pushed by Glenn Beck as well, that has an associate, supposedly, of LBJ.
00:59:40.000Talking openly to another associate of LBJ about how they had hired somebody to kill the President of the United States.
00:59:46.000What do you make of that tape and all this stuff?
00:59:48.000So first of all, there are about 25 to 28 people that have claimed credit for being the second shooter at Dealey Plaza.
00:59:55.000They've actually come forward in the past and said, by the way, I was the Grassy Knoll shooter.
00:59:58.000There are people that put themselves into the history books to try to claim that they've had some role.
01:00:02.000Carlos Marcello, the mob boss from Louisiana, later claimed, supposedly near the end of his life, that he had a role in killing Kennedy.
01:00:09.000There's almost a braggadocio to be able to say, oh, yeah, Kennedy, I had him off.
01:00:54.000I see people make up things to try to put into the case.
01:00:58.000And what I find remarkable Is that there's almost a gullibility that people are so willing in this echo chamber to believe that they must have a conspiracy somewhere when they're presented something that they otherwise would have dismissed as not being credible.
01:01:13.000They would have said, oh, that, by the way, that doesn't have any of the earmarks of real good evidence.
01:01:17.000They somehow are willing to accept it and then give it the airing that catches millions of other people's attention.
01:01:24.000Now, as you said earlier, you know, I think that one of the reasons this is so live and people get animated is because It would, in fact, be incredibly relevant if, for example, LBJ had been behind the assassination of JFK, or if the CIA had been involved, because that would change your perception of what the CIA is, and what it can do, and who's still there, and what are the sort of systemic problems inside the CIA.
01:01:42.000The CIA is, of course, another sort of target of the idea that they were behind the JFK assassination.
01:02:14.000The real question always became for me, when he, Oswald, went to Mexico City, Only six weeks before the assassination, he wanted to get to Cuba, to Havana, to the real revolution, as he viewed it, where Castro was, because he was sick of the Soviets.
01:02:27.000He thought that they had ruined and bastardized Marxism.
01:02:30.000He hated the United States, so he was looking now for the new place, and that was Cuba.
01:02:34.000Then he gets rejected in Mexico City by the Cuban and the Soviet missions.
01:02:40.000We know that the CIA had to have listening devices, other surveillance on those two missions at the heart of the Cold War.
01:02:45.000Did they know That Oswald was unhinged as he was when he went to those embassies?
01:02:50.000We now know what happened because the Soviets have released their own files.
01:02:54.000The KGB agents who dealt with him in Mexico City said, by the way, he took out a.38 caliber revolver, which he happened to kill a policeman with after the JFK assassination, slammed it on the desk, and one of the KGB agents took the pistol and emptied from the revolver the bullets.
01:03:09.000Did the CIA know that he had had that type of behavior?
01:03:12.000If so, They should have told the FBI when he came back into the United States ten days later.
01:03:17.000But we know from 9-11, the agencies don't share information very well.
01:03:21.000The CIA didn't share information with the FBI or the FAA or anyone else in 9-11 about two Saudi terrorists that had followed into California in 2000 that ended up on the planes.
01:03:30.000So this is what happens time and time again.
01:03:35.000No. What the CIA was covering up after with the Warren Commission was its own bureaucratic ineptitude.
01:03:40.000They were running as far away from Oswald as they could, which you would expect the same as the FBI would, and they basically really were covering up the fact that they were in league with the mafia to kill a head of state.
01:03:54.000And they failed seven times, they didn't even wound him.
01:03:57.000So the same Keystone cops that couldn't even kill Castro, they wanted to take Cuba back, that was clear, somehow pulled off the perfect crime in Dallas, and 62 years later, there's not a leaked memo, there's not one person with a bad conscience, there's not one time that anybody's had anything come out.
01:04:13.000It just doesn't happen that way, except in Oliver Stone films.
01:04:16.000So, Oliver Stone actually appeared as a witness at a House committee this week, Uh, to talk about the JFK assassination and talk about how there needed to be more material that was released.
01:04:26.000How much material has been released on the JFK assassination?
01:04:30.000Non-credible for people who think he might be so so I mean I say only Partly tongue-in-cheek that the only thing that stone got right and the JFK film was the date on which Kennedy was killed It's not quite that bad as what's almost the case.
01:04:42.000He is a master being able to make a film that has authentic film together with what he's done is recreation if he had made a film that said by the way the Holocaust is a hoax and it was as good a film as that there'd be people demonstrating in front of the theaters to say close this up this is a bastardization of history, But the JFK assassination, even by the time that he had done it in 1991, had passed into a board game.
01:05:09.000So Stone was able to get away with that.
01:05:11.000And then he's resurrected all these years later to come before this committee yesterday in front of the House and says essentially, despite millions of documents having been released since 1993, millions of pages, all the time.
01:05:23.000All of the last 80,000 pages out now, and everyone admits no smoking gun in them after all this time.
01:05:37.000Let's go through the autopsy and the witnesses and everything else.
01:05:40.000And I'm thinking to myself, oh my goodness, is there a 911 call, an emergency line that I can call DOJ?
01:05:46.000Because this is the type of thing they should put a stop to tomorrow.
01:05:49.000So, let's talk for a second about the brand new conspiracy theory that is now being aired, one that I didn't see coming.
01:05:54.000And again, I read a lot about this back in the early 2000s when I was in law school, and there are many theories that have been put out there.
01:06:02.000It's rare that you get a new sort of conspiracy theory about an event that happened 60 years ago.
01:06:06.000But there's a theory now that's being trafficked online, that the Israelis were behind the murder of JFK, either because JFK was going to list AIPAC, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, As far as I can tell.
01:06:21.000sanction it or because JFK wanted to shut down the nuclear reactor in Israel at Dimona and therefore the Israelis must have done it.
01:06:30.000As far as I can see, See, zero evidence has been deduced to this proposition, like literally zero.
01:06:34.000And yet this has become the hot story.
01:06:35.000It's now taken as point of fact, actually, by many of the conspiracists online.
01:06:57.000Inside of these documents that have been released, and I've gone through all 80,000, blurry-eyed, up a few nights, not getting much sleep, there isn't anything that adds any credibility to that.
01:07:06.000Because there is no evidence, because it's a bogus theory.
01:07:09.000But that hasn't stopped it from being spread around.
01:07:11.000Some people just saying, influencers, who should know better, in some cases they do know better, but they're getting likes, and they're getting tens of thousands of views, saying Israel's responsible for this.
01:08:08.000But instead of looking at that historical record of the Israelis actually saying what happened and maybe it was the Cubans, instead today we have it turned around so it becomes a traditional anti-Semitic conspiracy theory.
01:08:19.000It's fanned, it's said, it's spoken out there.
01:08:50.000I think one of my favorite things is the trafficking round of a document that shows that redacted in the documents was the word Israel because Israeli intelligence had been helping American intelligence.
01:08:58.000As you point out, there's one factor that's missing there.
01:09:22.000That's all the type of information that's been redacted over the years.
01:09:24.000And one of the redactions Was to Israeli intelligence.
01:09:27.000The minute the Israeli intelligence was unredacted, nobody says, oh, by the way, the unredacted MI6 in Britain, the unredacted French intelligence or West German intelligence, they must have been behind the assassination.
01:09:38.000They said, oh, look at that, the unredacted Israeli intelligence, and they did that because they were protecting it, because Israel must have been involved, therefore, with the CIA in killing Kennedy.
01:09:48.000This is one, it's not just a bogus theory, it's not just something that I can say to you it's laughable.
01:09:53.000It would have been laughable if it wasn't for the fact that it's trending on some accounts on Twitter by really influencers who I think in some cases know it's bogus, know it's false, don't care, they just happen to like the fact that they're getting some likes.
01:10:05.000So let's talk about sort of the dispositive facts that stand behind the fact that it was, in fact, Lee Harvey Oswald.
01:10:11.000Because there are certain questions that the conspiracists simply can't answer.
01:10:14.000In fact, most of the questions Are unanswerable, because as you say, the documentary and physical evidence record is overwhelming in this particular case.
01:10:21.000So why don't you talk about the things that you find the most convincing for people who are skeptical, that they still think it's a conspiracy.
01:10:27.000So I think that, I mean, there isn't an easy soundbite in this sense, but the real answer as to why Oswald alone killed Kennedy is Oswald himself.
01:10:35.000Without understanding Oswald, you can't get an idea as to how the assassination happened.
01:10:38.000And what the conspiracy theorists do, and you know this so well, is Oswald becomes a cipher.
01:11:07.000Most people don't realize that he was committed to political assassination, and I don't just say that.
01:11:12.000He had tried to kill somebody in April of that year.
01:11:14.000A retired army general, a right-wing army general, Edwin Walker, kicked out of the army because he was sort of fomenting all types of dissent inside the military.
01:11:25.000He'd run for the governorship of Texas.
01:11:30.000You can argue with Oswald as to whether that was right or not.
01:11:33.000It's one of the things I always used to say when the left would call Trump time and time again, he's the next Hitler, he's coming in, he's the next Hitler, he's a fascist.
01:11:39.000You say that long enough and you're going to take somebody who's already a little bit unstable and they're going to say, well, gee, if I was able to take a time machine back to the 1930s, I might stop Hitler from doing all those terrible things.
01:11:50.000You call somebody Hitler long enough, somebody's going to say, I'm going to try to stop him.
01:11:54.000That's what Oswald thought he was doing with Edwin Walker.
01:11:57.000She tries to assassinate him in April, shoots at him, misses by a fraction of an inch because the bullets deflected on the window frame into Walker's house.
01:12:08.000And then he decides to go and join the revolution inside of Havana.
01:12:12.000He gets rejected and comes back to the United States literally only five weeks before the assassination.
01:12:18.000But here's the key, Ben, and nobody talks about this.
01:12:32.000He wouldn't have been there for the assassination.
01:12:34.000When he's taking the bus ride, it's an overnight bus ride to Laredo, Texas, and then into Mexico City on September 25th.
01:12:40.000The White House announced for the first time that Kennedy was going to visit Texas.
01:12:43.000So any idea of a plot in Texas to kill the president could not have taken place before the White House announces the president's going there.
01:12:55.000That means that any conspiracy around Oswald and the president has to take place from his return to Dallas in early October until the time of the assassination.
01:13:42.000They interview him and they put him at the downtown location.
01:13:45.000And then the Secret Service sets the motorcade route only a few days before Oswald actually sees it in the newspaper.
01:13:52.000You know, we used to publish the newspaper accounts, right, of where the president was.
01:13:55.000And the president used to take a motorcade that had a convertible just a week before Dallas.
01:14:02.000He was in Tampa for the longest motorcade of his presidency, 25 miles in an open air car.
01:14:09.000So Kennedy used to go into the crowds all the time as he did that day in Dallas.
01:14:13.000So there were many opportunities to shoot him.
01:14:15.000And you have to ask yourself one question.
01:14:17.000If you were part of a conspiracy, if you were the CIA, you were the mob, if you were somebody else and you said to Oswald, we want you to be the assassin, you're going to be the assassin to kill the president.
01:14:26.000The president is at a dozen different locations where he's standing still.
01:14:31.000He's on a stage, he's talking, as Trump was in Butler.
01:14:34.000When the assassin tried to shoot him, He's not riding in a motorcade.
01:14:38.000So you want, even if Oswald doesn't want to run up with a pistol and shoot him in person as Sirhan Sirhan did to Robert Kennedy, because he doesn't want to be tackled at the scene.
01:14:46.000So he says, I want to do it with a rifle shot.
01:14:50.000So you put him from a distance when JFK is giving a stationary talk and you have Oswald kill him.
01:14:55.000But instead, the conspirators decide, you know what?
01:14:58.000Why don't we put Lee in the sixth floor of a building where hundreds of people might see him as he's going by and the motorcade is moving and he can try to take a couple of shots from there and see if he can hit the president.
01:15:08.000You don't do that if you're the conspirators.
01:15:09.000You do that if you're the lone assassin who's looking for opportunities, the means and opportunity to be able to do it.
01:15:16.000Oswald doesn't even retrieve the rifle that's tied ballistically to the assassination to the exclusion of every other gun in the world until the night before when he goes out to get it where his wife is staying from a garage.
01:15:26.000Takes it in the next morning in a long paper bag that he tells the person who's driving him in their curtain rods.
01:15:32.000And then he brings it to the sixth floor of the depository from where the sniper's nest is set up.
01:15:36.000He's left alone there by six of his co-workers half an hour beforehand.
01:15:40.000And when the assassination is over, guess who's the only person who leaves the depository?
01:15:49.000He goes back to his rooming house where he collects his pistol that he slammed on the desk of the KGB agents five weeks earlier in Mexico City and they get stopped by a police officer who has an all-points bulletin out on a general description of Oswald by a construction worker who is the only eyewitness who actually saw him doing the shooting that day and gave the general description, mid-twenties, brown hair, Caucasian.
01:16:12.000And when the police officer stops him, he empties his The idea that this person is not the assassin, to me, is so preposterous on his face.
01:16:29.000If you're willing to look at the credible evidence, here's the more difficult question.
01:16:34.000Was he shooting the president for his own warped motivations?
01:16:36.000Or was he doing it as a plot for others?
01:16:39.000When you then investigate that, I'm convinced he's doing it for himself because there isn't an intelligence agency or group of plotters like the Mafia or that in the world that could trust Lee Harvey Oswald.
01:17:15.000But in the rest of them, you're always trying to figure out James Earl Ray and others.
01:17:17.000You're trying to figure out whether they were doing it for themselves or as part of a plot.
01:17:21.000But to say that Oswald was innocent, that he wasn't part of it, that there was a secret assassin, there was somebody in the grassy knoll who did the shooting, that all the evidence has been concocted, changed, modified.
01:17:32.000That's the part in which you now have a conspiracy that doesn't involve two people, five people, kitchen conspiracy.
01:17:38.000You have a conspiracy literally of hundreds of people.
01:17:51.000You know, the very same government that can't build a homeless shelter on time or on budget was somehow able to pull off this diabolical crime in Dallas and do it with peak efficiency.
01:18:00.000The 007s, the James Bonds of the world, exist on film.
01:18:05.000So you've spent an enormous amount of time, obviously, looking into the most conspiracized event of the 20th century.
01:18:11.000But one of the things that's happened is that conspiracy theories have become more and more prominent in American life just generally.
01:18:19.000And we should differentiate here between actual conspiracies and conspiracy theories.
01:18:22.000Obviously, there are actual conspiracies in which people get together and they actually do things.
01:18:26.000And the way that you can tell the difference is the thing called evidence, where you actually look at the evidence of people getting together and doing the things as opposed to just theorizing that There was a motive to do it, and motive alone is evidence that, you know, who benefits.
01:18:38.000If somebody benefits, it must have been that person.
01:18:40.000Or you take a piece of evidence here that has nothing to do with the piece of evidence here, and you kind of string it through a variety of knots and somehow come up with a theory.
01:19:13.000And then in the 70s, it starts to climb and climb really rapidly.
01:19:16.000And now some 80% of Americans think that it wasn't Oswald who was acting alone.
01:19:20.000So between 70% and 80% of Americans become sort of the common writ of American public Well, I think there are a couple things.
01:19:29.000There are a few things peculiar to the Kennedy assassination, and the biggest reason that that's always going to be like that is because you have the person charged with killing the President of the United States killed two days later in police custody by a guy who looks like he's out of central casting for the mafia.
01:19:43.000So, if James Earl Ray had been killed two days after he'd been arrested by somebody who had ties to the KKK or whatever, we'd be off and running on conspiracy theories forever.
01:19:54.000If Oswald today was alive, and he was in his late 80s, and he was still saying, I'm innocent, I didn't do it, there would be some people who would listen to him, but it wouldn't be necessarily the same.
01:20:04.000The other thing was, it was the first time in modern American history that we had an assassination, the other one being King five years later, in which it was done by a rifle shot from a distance.
01:20:12.000that immediately conjures up the ideas of Dayo the Jackal, a professional assassin.
01:20:16.000You know, we're accustomed to having somebody from the Archduke up, you know, through other periods, running up with a pistol, shooting the person and gets tackled at the scene.
01:20:35.000In addition, people don't believe in blue ribbon panels anymore.
01:20:39.000They might have had some doubt about it then, but the idea that you're going to have the Warren Commission come out a year later and say, oh, by the way, there's nothing here.
01:20:50.000Facts are repeated that are incorrect.
01:20:52.000You get the House Select Committee in the late 70s, which is a reinvestigation that was great.
01:20:56.000They debunked a lot of material, but they fell, as I call it, for two sound acoustic experts from New York who came in at the end, listened to a dictabelt from a Dallas police station and said, oh, by the way, we think there's a 95% certainty there were four shots in that dictabelt, not three, which would mean a conspiracy.
01:21:13.000By the way, if you listen to it, you don't hear any sounds.
01:21:15.000They say there's some supersonic impulses here.
01:21:34.000I don't believe there was a conspiracy in the JFK assassination, but I know there are conspiracies and sometimes the government conspires against our own interests.
01:21:42.000So I've lived through consequential conspiracies from lies about Vietnam over a period of time to Watergate.
01:22:03.000Not a mention in there of anything to do with JFK, nothing to do at any point with an alien having landed Area 51. At some point what you said is key.
01:22:19.000People think that if I say Oswald alone killed Kennedy, I'm also saying there was no conspiracy to kill John Kennedy.
01:22:25.000No. There could have been a conspiracy to kill John Kennedy.
01:22:29.000Right now, as we're talking, there could be some group of conspirators sitting out and talking about wanting to kill Donald Trump.
01:22:34.000Or when Barack Obama was in office, or any president, there's probably a group sitting around saying, I'd like to get that president.
01:22:40.000Whether it's Islamist or whoever, there's a group.
01:22:44.000So, with Kennedy, you could have had a group of mobsters sitting around a table saying that no good brother of his as Attorney General is trying to break us up, I'd like to get one of the Kennedys.
01:22:52.000You could have had anti-Castro Cubans who thought that Kennedy was a traitor because he had let them down in the Bay of Pigs by not bombing, saying, I think he's treasonous, we should get rid of him.
01:23:01.000What I'm saying is, you need then to tie a piece of evidence into those conspiracies To Lee Harvey Oswald.