The Ben Shapiro Show - Who Shot JFK?

00:00:00.000 Folks, we've got a lot to get to today on the show.

00:00:02.000 We're going to get into Cory Booker speaking for like 25 hours.

00:00:05.000 Oh my gosh, Democrats are celebrating!

00:00:06.000 And we're going to get into election results from Florida and Wisconsin.

00:00:09.000 And we're going to talk in-depth about the assassination of JFK.

00:00:12.000 We can get into that like really in-depth today on the show.

00:00:15.000 First, 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.

00:00:23.000 The fight is not over because of one bad day at the legislature, because it turns out that California said no.

00:00:27.000 Shocker, because that's California.

00:00:29.000 But here's the thing.

00:00:30.000 When we take on a cause, We go all in.

00:00:32.000 We are going to continue fighting on this front.

00:00:34.000 We've won nationally.

00:00:35.000 Now it's time to win in the states.

00:00:36.000 With your support, we can keep covering the issues that matter.

00:00:38.000 We can keep making the content that shapes culture.

00:00:40.000 We can keep making a difference.

00:00:41.000 Join the fight right now at dailywire.com slash subscribe.

00:00:44.000 By the way, I may as well just lead off with this.

00:00:46.000 Matt did an amazing job.

00:00:47.000 He was testifying before what appeared to be the world's tiniest committee room.

00:00:51.000 It 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. 0.97

00:01:01.000 Here was Matt doing what Matt does best yesterday.

00:01:04.000 Compelling women to take part in this untruth is evil, perverse, and predatory. 1.00

00:01:08.000 If you would use the force of law to compel young girls to use a changing room with a boy, you are yourselves predators. 0.99

00:01:16.000 Transgenderism is a lie. 1.00

00:01:17.000 It is in fact the most deranged lie that mankind has ever invented. 0.98

00:01:21.000 In a free country, nobody should ever be forced to participate in a lie.

00:01:26.000 As lawmakers, you have an obligation to the truth.

00:01:29.000 It is a truth that I know you all recognize because every human who has ever lived on earth recognizes it.

00:01:35.000 That men are men and women are women. 0.83

00:01:37.000 It is that simple.

00:01:38.000 And the question before you is just as simple.

00:01:40.000 The question is this.

00:01:41.000 Will you side with the truth, a truth so basic that every toddler understands it?

00:01:47.000 Or will you disgrace yourselves by denying it?

00:01:50.000 That is your choice to make.

00:01:52.000 Well, the answer in California, by the way, was that they would just continue to deny it, which is why Democrats have been losing nationally.

00:01:57.000 This is a major issue, and Democrats have been disconnected from reality.

00:02:01.000 That disconnect from reality doesn't mean they'll never win another election.

00:02:04.000 Yesterday, there were some election results out of Florida and Wisconsin.

00:02:08.000 The election results out of Florida are good.

00:02:10.000 The election results out of Wisconsin were not good.

00:02:14.000 The election results out of Florida, there were two Districts in which the Congress people either took another job or retired from their district.

00:02:21.000 One was Matt Gaetz's district.

00:02:22.000 Jimmy Patronus ended up winning that seat, holding it for Republicans.

00:02:25.000 And then there was Mike Waltz's district.

00:02:27.000 He, of course, is the National Security Advisor.

00:02:28.000 His district, Florida 6, is a R plus 30 district for President Trump.

00:02:33.000 And Randy Fine, who's a state senator here, ended up winning.

00:02:35.000 That was expected to be a pretty close race.

00:02:37.000 It turned out not to be a particularly close race.

00:02:39.000 I was involved in a tele-town hall that we did just before the election.

00:02:44.000 So, 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.

00:02:52.000 The 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?

00:03:21.000 Scott Walker did that years ago.

00:03:23.000 That could easily be reversed by a liberal Supreme Court.

00:03:26.000 Also, 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.

00:03:39.000 All of this despite the fact that Elon Musk put gigantic tens of millions of dollars investments in that Wisconsin Supreme Court election.

00:03:47.000 The liberal judge in this particular case, Judge Susan Crawford, secured a victory, obviously.

00:03:54.000 The state Supreme Court race was technically nonpartisan, but it set a spending record for a US judicial contest.

00:04:00.000 Wisconsin awarded Trump his narrowest state margin in November.

00:04:03.000 And the race was closely watched for how swing state voters have digested the 10 weeks since his inauguration.

00:04:07.000 It's very difficult to tell, by the way, in special elections how people are actually going to vote in a presidential.

00:04:13.000 You 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.

00:04:22.000 Usually only the base turns up and like the base of the base.

00:04:25.000 Democrats are trying to suggest that this is the beginning of their comeback.

00:04:28.000 Crawford said, I never could have imagined I'd be taking on the richest man in the world for justice in Wisconsin, and we won.

00:04:34.000 Now again, she was replacing a liberal justice in Wisconsin. 0.99

00:04:39.000 Crawford's win means the court keeps that 4-3 liberal majority.

00:04:44.000 Crawford won pretty handily with 98% of the expected vote counted.

00:04:47.000 She was leading Schimmel 55 to 44. Brad Schimmel was the Republican candidate for the judiciary there.

00:04:53.000 In 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.

00:05:01.000 So again, yeah, I don't think you can read this as a broad national trend, and Democrats still have an uphill battle.

00:05:06.000 Speaking of which, they are lacking any sort of real leadership at the top of the Democratic Party.

00:05:10.000 So, Cory Booker, who once ran for pre- I know you forgot about that.

00:05:13.000 He actually did. 0.74

00:05:14.000 He ran for president, and he totally flamed out because he's a big weirdo. 0.75

00:05:18.000 And Cory Booker has been a big weirdo for a long time.

00:05:22.000 As I've said before about Cory Booker, He is the least authentic politician perhaps I have ever seen.

00:05:27.000 I call him Mr. Potato Head because in his back pocket, he has angry eyes.

00:05:30.000 And every so often, in the middle of a speech, you'll go, Mr. Potato, take out your angry eyes!

00:05:35.000 He'll take out his angry eyes and...

00:05:36.000 And there was a lot of that yesterday because he spoke for 24 hours.

00:05:42.000 He wasn't filibustering anything, by the way.

00:05:44.000 This isn't Mr. Smith goes to Washington, where he's filibustering a bad piece of legislation.

00:05:48.000 This 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.

00:05:56.000 Apparently, the question everybody was asking, of course, was the Mike Mulligan question, how does he poop?

00:06:01.000 The answer, apparently, is that he dehydrated himself.

00:06:04.000 He talked about this, that he didn't eat for like a day before, and then he stopped drinking maybe 10 hours before.

00:06:11.000 So he was totally dehydrated and somewhat deranged.

00:06:14.000 And then he stood there and he spoke.

00:06:16.000 And Democrats are like, this is amazing.

00:06:17.000 It's just amazing.

00:06:19.000 That man stood there and he spoke for 24 hours.

00:06:22.000 For 24 hours, he just stood there and he spoke.

00:06:25.000 That's true heroism.

00:06:26.000 And every human being on planet Earth went, well, I have like a friend of my spouse's who speaks like that.

00:06:33.000 And they're really annoying.

00:06:34.000 And that's really what it was.

00:06:35.000 So here was Mr. Potato Head.

00:06:36.000 He popped in those angry eyes and ranted about Trump for like 24 hours.

00:06:40.000 To call to the conscience of this nation to say I will not stand for another American to lose their health care for a billionaire.

00:06:48.000 I will not stand for another veteran who's dedicated to stopping the suicide of other veterans to lose their job.

00:06:54.000 I won't stand for the air quality in my community to be worse because they're letting polluters pollute more.

00:07:00.000 I 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.

00:07:16.000 When is it going to be enough?

00:07:18.000 My voice is inadequate.

00:07:19.000 My efforts today are inadequate to stop what they're trying to do.

00:07:25.000 But we, the people, are powerful.

00:07:28.000 We are strong.

00:07:30.000 We have changed history.

00:07:31.000 We have bent the arc of the moral universe.

00:07:33.000 And now is that moral moment again.

00:07:35.000 It's the moral moment again.

00:07:40.000 God bless America!

00:07:42.000 We need you now!

00:07:43.000 God bless America!

00:07:45.000 If you love her, if you love your neighbor, if you love this country, show your love!

00:07:50.000 Stop them from doing what they're trying to do for almost 20 hours!

00:07:54.000 We have laid out what they're trying to do 20 hours!

00:07:58.000 I want to stand more, and I will, but I'm begging people, don't let this be another normal day in America.

00:08:08.000 Oh, good lord.

00:08:09.000 He went for a little over 25 hours. 0.91

00:08:12.000 The reason he went for a little over 25 hours, again, like, slow clap for that ridiculous performance by Cory Booker. 0.91

00:08:20.000 A laughably bad performance by Cory Booker.

00:08:22.000 It 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.

00:08:31.000 The 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.

00:08:38.000 So he did do that.

00:08:40.000 So I guess congratulations for talking for a super long time, politician who says nothing for a living.

00:08:45.000 That's really inspiring stuff.

00:08:47.000 By the way, Cory Booker, we should note, was an opponent of the filibuster.

00:08:51.000 He's an opponent of the filibuster because he thinks the filibuster is a Jim Crow holdover.

00:08:57.000 But now when he's doing it, when he's doing it, it's totally great.

00:09:00.000 If that sort of thing is your bag, I suppose that, you know, good for you.

00:09:04.000 By the way, this is an amazing way for senators to actually make a name for themselves.

00:09:08.000 Obviously, we've seen this in the past.

00:09:09.000 Senator Rand Paul did a really long filibuster with regard to the droning of a terrorist who was also an American citizen years back.

00:09:16.000 And Ted Cruz, of course, did a filibuster against Obamacare.

00:09:19.000 And now you have Senator Cory Booker doing this because he, of course, has presidential aspirations to grab the leadership of the party.

00:09:24.000 And there's nothing at the top of the Democratic Party's.

00:09:26.000 They're treating this as though this is some act of tremendous self-sacrifice that he didn't have to calf himself for 25 hours for.

00:09:33.000 Or something.

00:09:33.000 According 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.

00:09:48.000 ASTONISHING STAMINA!

00:09:49.000 Because he stood for 24 hours and yelled at the walls.

00:09:54.000 Wow. Good for him.

00:09:56.000 I'd like to introduce him to my toddler daughter who can do precisely the same thing.

00:09:59.000 I've seen her basically stay awake for 24 hours yelling at us. 1.00

00:10:02.000 It's happened.

00:10:03.000 So 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.

00:10:11.000 Mr. 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.

00:10:18.000 Oh, the heroism!

00:10:19.000 Oh! Oh, I love you!

00:10:21.000 God bless America!

00:10:24.000 In a show of physical and oratorical endurance, he lasted past sunset on Tuesday.

00:10:29.000 Assailing 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.

00:10:39.000 So congratulations to two Democrats on really, really long filibusters.

00:10:44.000 He finished by quoting John Lewis, the civil rights hero and congressman.

00:10:46.000 He 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.

00:10:53.000 Let's be bold in America.

00:10:56.000 And then, He said, to hate him is wrong.

00:10:59.000 He's talking about Strom Thurmond.

00:11:00.000 To hate him is wrong.

00:11:00.000 Maybe 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.

00:11:06.000 I'm not here, though, because of his speech.

00:11:07.000 I'm here despite his speech.

00:11:08.000 So, I mean, he clearly was aiming at like, oh my gosh, Guinness Book of World Records.

00:11:13.000 Here is your certificate, Mr. Booker.

00:11:15.000 You can put it right there on your wall next to the guy who made the largest card house.

00:11:20.000 Just really impressive, impressive stuff.

00:11:23.000 Well, 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.

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00:13:34.000 And of course, the Democrats looking for a moment of glory.

00:13:39.000 Democrats looking for a moment.

00:13:41.000 They are just beyond stunned by the bravery.

00:13:45.000 Senator Adam Schiff, another gigantic intellect of towering proportions.

00:13:51.000 of California, he got up to call Booker a towering intellect, which, um, yeah, my dude.

00:14:00.000 I'm gonna go no on that one.

00:14:02.000 It's a no from me, dog.

00:14:03.000 Here's Adam Schiff.

00:14:05.000 I thank you for being here.

00:14:08.000 Senator 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.

00:14:23.000 I have so many jokes right now.

00:14:25.000 So many jokes.

00:14:27.000 And I will not tell any of them.

00:14:29.000 Chuck Schumer.

00:14:30.000 So what they would do is every so often they would toss to one of the Democrats in the crowd to give him a round of applause.

00:14:34.000 And in the meantime, according to the New York Times, Mr. Booker's staff members jumped into action.

00:14:39.000 Kleenex for dabbing sweat from his brow was replenished.

00:14:42.000 My God.

00:14:43.000 I mean, it really is just impressive.

00:14:45.000 Just so impressive.

00:14:46.000 Like D-Day, basically.

00:14:47.000 A fresh binder thick with printed material was placed on the podium.

00:14:50.000 A binder.

00:14:51.000 with printed material.

00:14:53.000 Can you believe it?

00:14:54.000 Representatives who had crossed the Capitol from the house, filtered in, drawn by the spectacle.

00:14:57.000 They arrived, lingered, departed, each bearing witness to the endurance test unfolding.

00:15:02.000 I love the New York Times writing here.

00:15:04.000 Honest to God, whoever wrote, who wrote this totally crappy piece?

00:15:07.000 Seriously. I want to name, this is a three author article.

00:15:11.000 So I just want to name all three authors of this poetic nonsense.

00:15:15.000 Tim Balk, Mike Ives, and Matthew M. Polk Bigg.

00:15:18.000 I would really like for you guys to take a bow.

00:15:21.000 I'd like for you to take a bow.

00:15:23.000 Really, solid stuff.

00:15:25.000 Mr. Thurman had sustained himself by sipping orange juice and munching on bits of beef and pumpernickel.

00:15:29.000 It 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.

00:15:33.000 He had prepared for the speech by fasting for days, he told reporters on Tuesday night after the speech.

00:15:37.000 Before he began on Monday, he had not had food since Friday or water since Sunday.

00:15:41.000 The 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.

00:15:47.000 Instead of figuring out how to go to the bathroom, he said, I ended up, I think, really unfortunately, dehydrating myself.

00:15:53.000 During the speech, you recalled, he really started to cramp up.

00:15:55.000 I'm sorry, he wasn't running a marathon, guys.

00:15:58.000 It turns out this is the Senate.

00:16:00.000 Sir, this is a Wendy's.

00:16:02.000 Oh my gosh.

00:16:03.000 Oh my god.

00:16:04.000 It's just...

00:16:05.000 And 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. 0.88

00:16:14.000 Senator Chris Murphy, another clown from Connecticut, He said it's a stunning biological feat.

00:16:19.000 Okay, can we, like, a stunning bi- Is he a triathlete? 0.95

00:16:23.000 He stood there and he talked for 24 hours.

00:16:26.000 Like, congrats to him.

00:16:28.000 Really, a stunning biological- I understand that the average age in the United States Senate is 178 years old.

00:16:34.000 And I understand that you had a president five minutes ago who couldn't even stand for like 30 seconds at a time without keeling over.

00:16:41.000 A stunning biological feat?

00:16:43.000 Truly stunning.

00:16:45.000 Okay. He gets no bathroom breaks.

00:16:50.000 I thought that was the case.

00:16:52.000 I went through this for 15 hours.

00:16:54.000 It's quite different for 24 hours.

00:16:56.000 No bathroom breaks.

00:16:57.000 Can't sit down.

00:16:58.000 Can't even move from his desk or he loses his right to remain on the floor.

00:17:03.000 So yeah, a pretty stunning biological feat being pulled off by Cory Booker on the floor of the Senate right now.

00:17:11.000 Oh my goodness, these people.

00:17:12.000 I love that the best they can do is get Mr. Potato Head to jabber at you for 25 hours.

00:17:18.000 This is how badly they are doing right now.

00:17:19.000 They can't stop anything.

00:17:20.000 They can't actually push an agenda that makes any sense to Americans.

00:17:23.000 But what if we have a guy whose job it is to talk, talk for a super long time while standing there?

00:17:30.000 Then will you be convinced?

00:17:32.000 Then will you be convinced?

00:17:34.000 The reality is that the only hope for Democrats right now is for Trump to fall on his face.

00:17:37.000 That's really the only thing that can save Democrats right now.

00:17:40.000 They, of course, are hoping very much for the economy to collapse.

00:17:44.000 Later today, President Trump is scheduled to make his announcement about what exactly is going to happen with the Liberation Day tariffs.

00:17:53.000 Right now, investors seem, you know, kind of skittish.

00:17:56.000 It's not clear exactly where their heads are at on what Trump is going to do.

00:18:01.000 They seem a little bit more sanguine, frankly, than I think that they ought at this point.

00:18:05.000 But according to The Wall Street Journal, Let's get started.

00:18:31.000 What are the reasons for this?

00:18:32.000 One, investors' continued confidence that Trump won't stick with any tariff policy that would cause a serious drag on growth.

00:18:37.000 Again, I've made that case myself.

00:18:38.000 That 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.

00:18:44.000 Two, their view that they need to see more signs the economy is actually in trouble before they bet on a recession.

00:18:49.000 And three, a belief that as we get more information, there will be more certainty in the markets.

00:18:54.000 So we are going to find out.

00:18:56.000 In 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.

00:19:08.000 That bank now sees a 35% chance of recession over the next 12 months, up from 20% previously.

00:19:14.000 But again, everything is sort of up in the air at this point.

00:19:17.000 The White House continues to preach confidence about whatever tariffs are going to come out.

00:19:21.000 And again, we have no idea.

00:19:22.000 President Trump loves a surprise announcement.

00:19:23.000 It is his M.O. Here's Caroline Lovett at the White House saying whatever he does is going to work, which of course is her job.

00:19:29.000 And you said that the president right now is with the trade and tariff team.

00:19:33.000 They are very confident that this is all going to work.

00:19:37.000 Yes. But what if they're wrong?

00:19:38.000 They're not going to be wrong.

00:19:40.000 It is going to work.

00:19:41.000 And the president has a brilliant team of advisors who have been studying these issues for decades.

00:19:47.000 And we are focused on restoring the golden age of America.

00:19:53.000 So, again, that's her job.

00:19:55.000 Energy Secretary Chris Wright, he says that the plan here is to get everybody else to lower their tariffs.

00:19:59.000 Again, if this is the plan, I'm in.

00:20:01.000 Sounds great.

00:20:01.000 Everybody lowers their tariffs.

00:20:02.000 Free trade for all.

00:20:04.000 Great distribution of products.

00:20:06.000 Excellent supply chains.

00:20:07.000 Lower prices for American consumers.

00:20:09.000 All the tariffs on us stop so we can actually start exporting more.

00:20:12.000 Sounds great.

00:20:13.000 Here's Chris Wright making this case.

00:20:16.000 What you're going to see is Tariffs on U.S. exports come down across the world.

00:20:23.000 President Trump's message has been free and fair trade, reciprocal trade.

00:20:28.000 I'm talking to foreign leaders all the time, and they want two key things.

00:20:32.000 They want to buy more American products.

00:20:34.000 I'm talking to them mostly about energy.

00:20:36.000 And they want to invest more dollars in the United States.

00:20:41.000 So again, his mouth to God's ears.

00:20:45.000 The problem is it could easily go the other way.

00:20:47.000 So there are a couple of different paths that this could take.

00:20:49.000 Israel is taking one path. 0.86

00:20:51.000 The EU is taking another.

00:20:51.000 So Israel is immediately ending all tariffs on all American products, which is great.

00:20:55.000 That sounds awesome.

00:20:56.000 That is a great way to get other countries to do that sort of thing.

00:21:00.000 And that's what I'm hoping that Trump is doing here.

00:21:01.000 It's leverage to get everybody else to lower their tariffs.

00:21:04.000 According 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.

00:21:17.000 I guess the idea is, ain't no reciprocal duties if we ain't got no duties.

00:21:20.000 The order was coordinated with Prime Minister Netanyahu and Economy Minister Nir Barkat.

00:21:24.000 It's subject to final approval by the Knesset Finance Committee.

00:21:27.000 That is one approach.

00:21:28.000 The EU is taking a totally different approach, which is we're going to tariff the living crap out of the United States.

00:21:33.000 According 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.

00:21:42.000 Liberation 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.

00:21:49.000 Universal tariffs soon followed on steel, aluminum, and then on cars.

00:21:52.000 Brussels 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.

00:22:01.000 The idea is to mirror the response.

00:22:03.000 But 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.

00:22:12.000 EEC President Ursula von der Leyen, the European Commission, she said, we'll approach these negotiations from a position of strength.

00:22:18.000 Europe holds a lot of cards.

00:22:19.000 From trade to technology to the size of our market, this strength is also built on our readiness to take firm countermeasures.

00:22:24.000 All instruments are on the table.

00:22:25.000 So what exactly could that involve?

00:22:27.000 Well, they could be thinking of putting tariffs on like JP Morgan or Bank of America or on X or on Google or on Amazon.

00:22:34.000 A 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.

00:22:41.000 So things could get heavy very, very quickly.

00:22:44.000 It remains to be seen exactly what Trump is proposing or what is going to come down the line.

00:22:48.000 So we will wait to see that come down later this afternoon.

00:22:51.000 Meanwhile, controversy continues over President Trump's immigration plans.

00:22:54.000 Trump can't stop and will not stop.

00:22:56.000 With 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.

00:23:12.000 U.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.

00:23:22.000 And those migrants included 10 Salvadoran and seven Venezuelan men who were previously being held at Gitmo.

00:23:28.000 Meanwhile, controversy again has broken out over the case of this supposed Maryland father.

00:23:34.000 That's how he was described by The Atlantic.

00:23:36.000 Was this guy actually a member of MS-13, an immigration judge?

00:23:39.000 So there's credible evidence that he was some six years ago.

00:23:42.000 Caroline 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.

00:23:57.000 And the administration made an administrative error and deported him and now they can't get him back.

00:24:00.000 Here's Caroline Leavitt saying, well, it's an administrative error.

00:24:03.000 That doesn't mean the guy should be in the United States.

00:24:05.000 The error that you are referring to was a clerical error.

00:24:09.000 It was an administrative error.

00:24:10.000 The 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.

00:24:22.000 That is fact number one.

00:24:23.000 Fact number two, we also have credible intelligence proving that this individual was involved in human trafficking.

00:24:29.000 And 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.

00:24:50.000 You know, more evidence to show who this guy was would obviously help the administration's case.

00:24:54.000 But, as we mentioned yesterday, the Atlantic kind of ignored a huge part of the story.

00:24:59.000 Meanwhile, Secretary of State Marco Rubio is ordering diplomats overseas to scrutinize social media of applicants for student and other types of visas.

00:25:06.000 Basically saying, you don't get in the country if you hate the West.

00:25:09.000 Which seems, you know, pretty fair.

00:25:11.000 Seems like a good way to screen out people who should not be in the United States in the first place. 0.99

00:25:15.000 Like if you're here spreading pro-terrorist content, what exactly are you doing in the United States?

00:25:19.000 We don't need more of you.

00:25:20.000 So Secretary of State Rubio is pursuing that.

00:25:22.000 Meanwhile, Democrats taking the wrong side of an 80-20 issue.

00:25:25.000 As always, Representative Jamie Raskin, he's demanding the return of illegal immigrants.

00:25:30.000 I 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.

00:25:47.000 and 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.

00:26:02.000 Again, President Trump continues to operate on solid bases with the American public.

00:26:07.000 The 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.

00:26:13.000 I'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.

00:26:20.000 I'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.

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00:28:43.000 Okay, meanwhile, the House Committee Task Force on the Declassification of Federal Secrets held yet another proceeding on the JFK assassination.

00:28:54.000 Now, you ask yourself, why exactly is there another hearing on the JFK assassination?

00:28:58.000 And 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.

00:29:08.000 Now, 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.

00:29:13.000 What 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.

00:29:22.000 The 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.

00:29:35.000 So, yesterday, the House Republicans decided they were going to have in Oliver Stone as an expert on the JFK assassination, which is an absurdity.

00:29:44.000 It's an absurdity.

00:29:45.000 JFK, the film, Which is, in fact, an incredibly well-produced film because Oliver Stone is a terrific director.

00:29:53.000 It's a load of tripe. 0.94

00:29:54.000 JFK, the movie, is just crap in terms of historical accuracy. 0.99

00:29:57.000 It's absolute sheer nonsense. 0.96

00:29:58.000 I know this because it was the JFK movie that got me into looking into this.

00:30:01.000 I remember watching this in law school.

00:30:03.000 And when I watched it in law school, I thought, wow, this is fascinating.

00:30:06.000 What a great movie.

00:30:07.000 And then I started reading pretty much everything I could get my hands on about the JFK assassination.

00:30:11.000 And 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.

00:30:18.000 And 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.

00:30:28.000 Once I know how the trick was done, then it's no longer an interesting trick.

00:30:32.000 And 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.

00:30:49.000 By 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.

00:30:56.000 And yet, still, the Republican members of Congress Mr. Stone,

00:31:17.000 you wrote a book accusing LBJ of being involved in the killing of President Kennedy.

00:31:28.000 Did these did these most recent releases confirm or negate your initial charge?

00:31:37.000 Being 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.

00:31:55.000 Of being part of a complicit in a cover-up of the case.

00:32:01.000 Mr. Morley, I think you had something to add on that.

00:32:03.000 I think you're confusing Mr. Oliver Stone with Mr. Roger Stone.

00:32:07.000 I haven't stated it yet.

00:32:08.000 Who? Sorry.

00:32:10.000 It's Roger Stone who implicated LBJ in the assassination of the President.

00:32:13.000 It's not my friend Oliver Stone.

00:32:15.000 I may have misinterpreted that and I apologize for that.

00:32:21.000 Now, again, do I think that Oliver Stone should be a credible House Committee source on the JFK assassination?

00:32:27.000 I don't.

00:32:28.000 I 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.

00:32:35.000 So, here's the thing.

00:32:37.000 I want to take a step back for a moment.

00:32:39.000 Right now, conspiracy theories are running wild on X about virtually every possible topic.

00:32:42.000 Now, there's a difference between a conspiracy and a conspiracy theory.

00:32:46.000 A conspiracy is a thing that actually exists in the real world.

00:32:48.000 In fact, we have an entire statute devoted To uncovering conspiracies and prosecuting.

00:32:52.000 That'd be the RICO Act.

00:32:55.000 It was an act directly tied to the idea of conspiracy connected to crime.

00:33:00.000 And so there are lots of conspiracies.

00:33:01.000 And 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.

00:33:07.000 So, 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.

00:33:18.000 That is true because there are emails showing that Anthony Fauci did that exact thing.

00:33:22.000 When 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.

00:33:44.000 The evidence makes it not a conspiracy theory, but a conspiracy.

00:33:47.000 Conspiracy theorists, however, that's a different thing.

00:33:50.000 And conspiracy theories are a different thing.

00:33:52.000 Conspiracy theories aren't just creeping into the fringe anymore.

00:33:55.000 They're staging a full-blown takeover in the public square.

00:33:57.000 You've seen it pretty much everywhere.

00:33:59.000 You 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.

00:34:06.000 This isn't skepticism, conspiracy theories.

00:34:08.000 They're not skepticism.

00:34:09.000 Skepticism would be that you question a thing and look for the evidence.

00:34:12.000 Not 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.

00:34:18.000 This isn't skepticism.

00:34:19.000 Conspiracy theorizing is not skepticism.

00:34:20.000 It is usually intellectual cowardice dressed up as critical thinking.

00:34:24.000 And 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.

00:34:36.000 And again, there are people who are in the basement, on the keyboards, who are actually doing real hard good work.

00:34:41.000 That's important.

00:34:42.000 If they're basing it on the evidence.

00:34:45.000 But that's not happening right now.

00:34:48.000 In order for us to have a functioning polity, you have to have a common set of facts.

00:34:52.000 Conspiracy theories are directly tied to no facts.

00:34:56.000 So 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.

00:35:07.000 This is what I call the QED of conspiracy thinking.

00:35:09.000 It's a simple framework.

00:35:11.000 Q is for fake questions, E is for fake evidence, and D is for fake defenses.

00:35:16.000 So this framework is designed to expose the intellectual dishonesty at the core of conspiracy thinking.

00:35:21.000 And 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.

00:35:28.000 So let's dive in.

00:35:28.000 First, Q, fake questions.

00:35:31.000 The fake questions are the foundation of conspiracy theories.

00:35:33.000 The first pillar in the conspiracy theory playbook are fake questions.

00:35:38.000 These are not genuine inquiries that are seeking truth Or evidence?

00:35:41.000 Or fact?

00:35:42.000 They're rhetorical devices designed to create doubt even where there's no evidence that the doubt should exist.

00:35:47.000 So the most obvious example of this is just asking questions.

00:35:50.000 This is when somebody poses a loaded question while they're pretending to be a neutral observer.

00:35:55.000 So say, I'm just asking questions.

00:35:57.000 Why won't the government discuss the second shooter on the grassy knoll in the JFK assassination?

00:36:00.000 Why can't we even talk about the JFK assassination?

00:36:03.000 Okay, the question presupposes a premise.

00:36:05.000 One, there's somebody trying to hide the truth from you.

00:36:08.000 Two, that they're trying to silence you.

00:36:09.000 And many of the people who use this kind of stuff are speaking to literally millions of people.

00:36:13.000 So, why can't we talk about the JFK assassination?

00:36:16.000 Hmm? 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.

00:36:24.000 They'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.

00:36:29.000 So, the just asking questions is a rhetorical sleight of hand.

00:36:32.000 Here is the problem.

00:36:33.000 The tactic puts the burden of proof on the wrong side.

00:36:35.000 So, typically, in logical discourse, if I make a contention, I have to Provide evidence of my claim.

00:36:41.000 I can't just make a claim and then ask somebody else to disprove it.

00:36:45.000 So if I'm going to debate and I make a claim, I should have evidence to back the claim.

00:36:49.000 I 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.

00:37:05.000 That's how an actual conversation typically works.

00:37:08.000 But that's not what's being done here.

00:37:11.000 Okay, next tactic in the Just Asking Questions section.

00:37:13.000 Motive over evidence.

00:37:15.000 Okay, 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.

00:37:25.000 And they show no actual connection between the person and the outcome, but if you benefit, then you must have done it.

00:37:30.000 So, Lyndon Johnson became president after JFK died.

00:37:33.000 Therefore, he assassinated JFK.

00:37:36.000 That is not In actual logical piece of reasoning.

00:37:39.000 It wouldn't pass muster in a freshman logic class.

00:37:42.000 Motive may suggest we're to look for evidence, but it is not evidence itself.

00:37:46.000 By 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.

00:37:57.000 You benefiting from a thing does not mean that you did the thing.

00:38:01.000 Even you benefiting from a bad thing.

00:38:03.000 If your aunt dies and leaves you a million dollars, it doesn't mean you murdered your aunt. 0.60

00:38:07.000 Then there's the appeal to ignorance.

00:38:08.000 This one is particularly insidious.

00:38:10.000 And you see this all the time, particularly in the interwebs.

00:38:13.000 And this is arguing that something has to be true because it hasn't been definitively disproven.

00:38:18.000 And here's the thing.

00:38:19.000 You can't very often definitively disprove anything.

00:38:23.000 I can make a case, as Richard Dawkins suggests, there's a spaghetti monster controlling all of human activity.

00:38:29.000 Okay, if I say there's a spaghetti monster controlling all of human activity, disprove it.

00:38:33.000 Okay, there's no way to disprove it.

00:38:35.000 And then you say, well, I'm not even claiming there's a spaghetti monster who's doing this sort of stuff.

00:38:40.000 I'm just saying it might happen.

00:38:42.000 Can you disprove that?

00:38:43.000 Well, this fundamentally misunderstands how knowledge works.

00:38:46.000 The absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, but neither is it evidence of presence.

00:38:51.000 The burden of proof lies with the person making the extraordinary claim.

00:38:54.000 And then there's the you don't know the whole story tactic.

00:38:57.000 This is a classic.

00:38:58.000 This is when somebody who is, again, retelling a conspiracy theory implies that there's hidden knowledge only the initiates can access.

00:39:05.000 And so you hear people say, they're not telling you everything.

00:39:07.000 Do your own research.

00:39:09.000 Now, of course, this is effective because sometimes people aren't telling you everything and you should do your own research.

00:39:13.000 But the thing is, nobody knows everything about complex events.

00:39:17.000 The conspiracy theory exploits that gap to insert a preferred narrative.

00:39:21.000 So 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.

00:39:31.000 You should do your own research.

00:39:32.000 And when people say this, typically what they mean is, you shouldn't do your own research.

00:39:35.000 You should listen to me.

00:39:36.000 Because you're not going to do your own research.

00:39:38.000 You might come to a different...

00:39:39.000 Instead, just listen to the theory that I'm retailing because I have done the research.

00:39:43.000 Which typically is rarely true.

00:39:46.000 Okay, now on to the second step.

00:39:47.000 These are all the fake questions.

00:39:48.000 Now we get to fake evidence.

00:39:50.000 And this is how you structure a conspiracy theory.

00:39:53.000 Fake 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.

00:40:01.000 So one tactic is cherry picking and secret sources.

00:40:04.000 Okay, cherry picking data or claiming secret sources, really great way of doing this.

00:40:08.000 So 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.

00:40:15.000 So they will say, did you know that Trotsky was a Jew?

00:40:19.000 And that means that the Sovietization of Russia was a Jewish plot. 0.88

00:40:25.000 Now, Lenin wasn't a Jew. 0.99

00:40:27.000 Stalin wasn't a Jew. 0.88

00:40:29.000 Tons of people in the Soviet infrastructure were not Jews, and even those who claimed Jewish background were not observant Jews in any way.

00:40:36.000 But, again, you're not going to hear about any of that because you're cherry-picking that.

00:40:40.000 This very often will happen when you're attempting to credit a group with outsized power.

00:40:45.000 You'll say, man, have you seen how many Jews there are in Hollywood?

00:40:49.000 And it's true, there are a lot of Jews in Hollywood.

00:40:50.000 Also, there are a lot of not Jews in Hollywood.

00:40:52.000 Also, there are very few religious Jews in Hollywood.

00:40:54.000 And you can do this with pretty much anything.

00:40:55.000 You just cherry pick one thing and ignore all of the rest of the things.

00:40:59.000 As 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?

00:41:06.000 They redacted Israel in those 80,000 pages of JFK?

00:41:09.000 Yes. Well, it turns out they also redacted Romanian intelligence.

00:41:12.000 They redacted Western German intelligence.

00:41:14.000 They redacted pretty much all the intelligence agencies.

00:41:16.000 But if you don't know that, then it looks like, ah, that is pretty suspicious.

00:41:20.000 Okay, so now let's talk about alleged secret sources.

00:41:23.000 So you hear this all the time, right?

00:41:24.000 I have a friend who works for the government, a credible person.

00:41:26.000 This person told me.

00:41:28.000 This person told me, and I believe that person.

00:41:29.000 Now, 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?

00:41:36.000 In actual journalism and academic research, you have to have multiple sources that confirm a thing.

00:41:41.000 And 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.

00:41:52.000 Okay, 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.

00:42:00.000 You wouldn't want them getting in trouble.

00:42:01.000 Okay, other false evidence.

00:42:03.000 This would be false cause.

00:42:05.000 This is rampant.

00:42:07.000 So, what they will do, people who are retelling conspiracy theory, is they will take two correlative events that are not causative.

00:42:14.000 So, I'll say, the government conducted a training exercise near New York, and then 9-11 happened.

00:42:18.000 These are connected.

00:42:19.000 It is a very basic post hoc ergo proctor hoc fallacy because one thing followed another, therefore the first thing caused the second thing.

00:42:27.000 So I wore my lucky socks and my team won, therefore my socks caused my team to win.

00:42:31.000 That is not an actual argument.

00:42:33.000 Correlation has to be proved to be causative, not just correlative.

00:42:38.000 Appeal to authority.

00:42:39.000 So 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.

00:42:46.000 There 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.

00:42:52.000 This has opened the door to a bunch of people who will now basically term anyone an expert on a topic.

00:42:58.000 And 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.

00:43:13.000 And claiming expertise is really quite easy in today's modern world.

00:43:17.000 You 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.

00:43:21.000 Well, 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.

00:43:28.000 You should actually, this is why evidence becomes more important, not less important.

00:43:32.000 If you don't trust the experts, then you should ask for the evidence across the board.

00:43:37.000 This should be a way of saying, don't cite your authorities, I won't cite my authorities, just bring the evidence.

00:43:42.000 That would be a way, but people don't bring the evidence.

00:43:44.000 They 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?

00:43:49.000 I don't have to question the narrative, but I don't know enough to question them, and they're an expert.

00:43:53.000 That is a cheap and easy way of avoiding responsibility for the theory that you are retailing.

00:43:57.000 And again, you see this all the time.

00:44:00.000 Another tactic here is overestimating coordination.

00:44:03.000 This 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.

00:44:15.000 It's sort of like how Copernicus rewrote the rules of how the universe works by discovering how they work because it was simple.

00:44:23.000 Ptolemaic 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.

00:44:32.000 And so the theory kept getting more and more and more complex because it wasn't true.

00:44:36.000 The same thing is true of most conspiracy theories.

00:44:39.000 Most conspiracy theories have to get more and more and more complex.

00:44:41.000 So, let's say you believe that the moon landing was faked.

00:44:44.000 Okay, that would not require a few dozen people to be in on it.

00:44:46.000 That would require thousands, probably tens of thousands of people to be in on it and maintain a perfect lie for literally decades.

00:44:54.000 So, question.

00:44:54.000 Have you ever tried to organize a surprise party?

00:44:57.000 Like just for a friend.

00:44:59.000 The 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.

00:45:04.000 Multiply that complexity by a thousand and you don't know any of these people.

00:45:07.000 And they're part of a government organization, for example, and you think that nothing is going to leak ever?

00:45:13.000 People talk, they make mistakes, they have crises of conscience.

00:45:16.000 Usually conspiracies that are successful are relatively small, and then they become open when they're still relatively small and they gain power.

00:45:25.000 So, for example, the Soviets, the original Soviet, was a conspiracy of people who were pretty open about their ambitions.

00:45:30.000 It started off secret, pretty quickly became not secret, and then they expanded their ambition.

00:45:34.000 But the idea that you can have a secret, massive conspiracy involving tens of thousands of people across decades, now you're straining rationality.

00:45:43.000 And then there's sort of us versus them thinking.

00:45:45.000 This is basically, you label, this isn't even an appeal to evidence at all.

00:45:50.000 This 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.

00:45:54.000 And if you're a credulous dupe and you don't believe us, then you're the them. 0.99

00:45:58.000 You're a sheeple. 0.99

00:45:59.000 You're a sheeple, right?

00:46:00.000 This is a great way Of simply alienating everybody who doesn't agree with you and calls for evidence.

00:46:06.000 It's because you must be a part of it.

00:46:07.000 It's you.

00:46:09.000 It's very emotionally satisfying because you feel like you're in the know.

00:46:12.000 You feel like you've gained the secrets of the universe.

00:46:14.000 But it's totally intellectually stunting.

00:46:16.000 The truth is that reality is really complex.

00:46:18.000 Most events result from a mixture of intentional actions, unintended consequences, systemic factors, lots of random chance.

00:46:25.000 That's life.

00:46:26.000 You know that in your own life.

00:46:27.000 Reducing that complexity to heroes and villains makes for great movies.

00:46:30.000 But it makes for really, really bad analysis.

00:46:33.000 And then there is confirmation bias and something called apophenia.

00:46:36.000 Confirmation bias is where you interpret information in a way that confirms your pre-existing beliefs.

00:46:41.000 So if you believe in a conspiracy, everything becomes evidence for the conspiracy.

00:46:44.000 Any contradictory evidence, you just dismiss it as part of the cover-up.

00:46:47.000 So let's say that you believe that JFK was assassinated by the mafia.

00:46:50.000 And then it turns out that actually Oswald didn't have any ties to the mafia.

00:46:52.000 You say, well, that's just because we haven't looked hard enough.

00:46:54.000 And anybody who makes that claim is probably in on it.

00:46:57.000 Then you pair that with apophenia, which is seeing meaningful patterns in random data.

00:47:02.000 And this happens all the time.

00:47:04.000 Human beings, our brains, they look for patterns.

00:47:07.000 But, as sort of the famous joke goes, conspiracy theorists see words in their Cheerios.

00:47:13.000 And so, you can do this really easily.

00:47:15.000 And you see the media actually do this sometimes.

00:47:17.000 These three unrelated politicians all visited the same city in different years.

00:47:21.000 It must be a conspiracy.

00:47:22.000 Well, no, it's just a coincidence, which is a real thing that exists in our universe and obtains in your life pretty much every day.

00:47:28.000 Okay, finally, so we've done the fake questions, the fake evidence, and then you finally get to the fake defenses.

00:47:32.000 And this is where somebody asks for evidence just over and over.

00:47:34.000 What's your evidence?

00:47:35.000 Show me the evidence.

00:47:37.000 And so now you need a defense.

00:47:39.000 So 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.

00:47:46.000 One is non-falsifiability.

00:47:49.000 The hallmark of pseudoscience, things that are not scientific, And again, there are many things in life that are not scientific, that's fine.

00:47:54.000 You can't falsify love, for example.

00:47:56.000 It's a personal feeling.

00:47:57.000 But, when it comes to claims about the world itself, you should have a falsifiable theory, as Karl Popper, pointing this out, the philosopher.

00:48:07.000 Conspiracy thinking is non-falsifiable.

00:48:09.000 You structure a claim so it can never be proved false.

00:48:11.000 A good theory makes predictions that could be disproven.

00:48:15.000 I've asked this to, you heard me ask this about the Derek Chauvin trial to, for example, Stephen A. Smith.

00:48:19.000 I said, is there any evidence that could possibly change your mind about this?

00:48:22.000 And he said, no.

00:48:23.000 I said, well, that's not a rational inquiry.

00:48:25.000 Because if nothing can change your mind about a thing, it is now a religious belief.

00:48:29.000 It is not a rational inquiry.

00:48:31.000 And there's a place in life for religious beliefs.

00:48:33.000 But that's not the place for unspooling a theory about, you know, like an assassination.

00:48:39.000 Conspiracy theories rarely do this because their theories are designed to be immune to evidence.

00:48:43.000 They don't want to actually provide a falsifiable thing.

00:48:48.000 Then there's moving the goalpost.

00:48:49.000 When it comes to global warming, for example, global warming, there are a couple things you can say that are plausible and falsifiable.

00:48:55.000 One, is the world getting warmer over time?

00:48:57.000 Two, does it correlate with human activity with regard to carbon?

00:49:01.000 The answer to both of those is yes.

00:49:02.000 What is the level of causation is still an open question.

00:49:05.000 What is a conspiracy theory is where they say the world's going to end in 2012.

00:49:08.000 And then it doesn't end in 2012, Greta Thunberg style.

00:49:11.000 And then you're like, okay, well, it didn't.

00:49:13.000 And she's like, well, I really meant 2024.

00:49:15.000 And then it's like, well, what I really meant was 2036.

00:49:18.000 He says this in Nostradamus a lot.

00:49:20.000 Okay, well, just move the timeline out.

00:49:21.000 Just move the timeline out.

00:49:22.000 Okay, well, usually in the real world, if you have a predictive fail, you have to revise your theory.

00:49:27.000 In conspiracy thinking, you simply revise the prediction.

00:49:30.000 One of the most common tactics here is circular reasoning.

00:49:33.000 So what you say is, we know that you're corrupt because you won't report on this conspiracy theory.

00:49:38.000 And we know the conspiracy is real because you won't report On the conspiracy theory.

00:49:44.000 It's a closed logical loop.

00:49:46.000 No external information is possible.

00:49:48.000 You're lying because the conspiracy theory is true.

00:49:50.000 The conspiracy theory is true because you're lying.

00:49:53.000 And around the circle you go.

00:49:55.000 And at no point does evidence ever enter the equation at any point.

00:49:59.000 Then there's the Kafka trap.

00:50:00.000 The Kafka trap is named after Franz Kafka's short story, The Trial, where denial of guilt is taken as evidence of guilt.

00:50:06.000 This is so common on X. So you'll say, No, I'm not involved in a conspiracy, nor do I think that that conspiracy is credible.

00:50:13.000 I say that, ah, because you're involved in the conspiracy.

00:50:16.000 That's why.

00:50:18.000 So it goes directly, it's a character attack, essentially.

00:50:20.000 It makes the accusation on false survival, because whether you deny or whether you confirm, both take in as confirmation.

00:50:27.000 Denial, silence, and confirmation are all the same under the Gafka trap. 0.66

00:50:30.000 If 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.

00:50:39.000 And if you confirm it, it's because it's true.

00:50:41.000 And if you stay silent, it's because you won't answer.

00:50:43.000 Because it's probably true.

00:50:44.000 That's the Kafka trap.

00:50:46.000 There's information overload as well.

00:50:48.000 So you see this a lot.

00:50:49.000 When challenged for evidence, what you will get is a bunch of unrelated gobbledygook facts that are stacked on top of each other super fast.

00:50:55.000 That sort of thing is very difficult to combat because it's sort of the equivalent of a terrorist rocket barrage.

00:51:02.000 It's a bunch of $50 rockets that are sent up.

00:51:04.000 And 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.

00:51:11.000 That 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.

00:51:19.000 Again, good tactic, bad logic.

00:51:21.000 Another tactic here, weaponizing doubt.

00:51:23.000 Conspiracy theorists excel at weaponizing doubt.

00:51:25.000 So, 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.

00:51:31.000 So they'll say, well, you know, There were initial reports from the government.

00:51:34.000 They got the time wrong by five minutes.

00:51:36.000 That means the whole report is BS.

00:51:38.000 The whole report is flawed.

00:51:40.000 This usually comes right after an event.

00:51:43.000 So right after a complex event is reported, there are usually errors.

00:51:46.000 This is why the best thing you can do on X or anywhere else in social media, when there's a controversial event, wait 48 hours.

00:51:51.000 Wait 48 hours to comment on it.

00:51:53.000 Because usually it takes a while for the truth to be established.

00:51:57.000 But what usually happens is people jump to a conclusion.

00:52:00.000 That conclusion is then used to discredit the actual truth because somebody made a mistake when they first reported the thing.

00:52:06.000 Okay, then there is false equivalence.

00:52:07.000 Again, this is a defense mechanism for a bad conspiracy theory where you say all sources are equally biased.

00:52:13.000 Sure, 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.

00:52:21.000 Okay, well, yes, the legacy media does lie.

00:52:23.000 That does not mean that all people are equally dishonest or that all cases are equally verifiable.

00:52:29.000 Or have equal veracity.

00:52:31.000 You have to actually establish this by the evidence.

00:52:35.000 The reality is that people say, oh, I don't, after COVID, I don't trust my doctor.

00:52:39.000 I 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.

00:52:47.000 Because the reality is that it depends what you're talking about, depends the topic, it depends the level of expertise.

00:52:53.000 Trying to equate everything, to flatten everything is a great way of making everything unfalsifiable.

00:52:58.000 Another tactic, the no true Scotsman tactic.

00:53:01.000 This is where somebody says, no true conspiracy researcher would deny the moon landing was faked.

00:53:07.000 Right? Which allows the community to maintain ideological purity, you just exclude a dissenter.

00:53:11.000 You say that person is not actually a member of our community.

00:53:13.000 They're not, they're not pure enough.

00:53:16.000 And then there is the deep play and the Motten-Bailey. 0.69

00:53:17.000 Again, you see these tactics all the time.

00:53:19.000 The deep play is really devious.

00:53:21.000 This is where every debunking becomes evidence of a deeper conspiracy.

00:53:24.000 So the fact that the legacy media is so intent on focusing on this theory, it shows that they're hiding something.

00:53:30.000 The fact that they keep spending time on this thing that I'm bringing up, it shows that they, they are, they must be, they're part of it.

00:53:35.000 And then there's the Mott& Bailey tactic.

00:53:37.000 So this is usually where somebody will make a totally implausible claim, like the government is run by lizard people. 0.73

00:53:44.000 And you're like, well, that's not true.

00:53:45.000 The government is not run by lizard people. 1.00

00:53:46.000 And then they will say, That would be the Bailey, like the outside of a castle.

00:53:50.000 And then when that's overrun, they'll say, well, I'm just claiming that the government lies to us sometimes.

00:53:53.000 Okay, like, I agree, the government lies to us sometimes, but that does not justify your main claim.

00:53:56.000 Now, again, in all of this, I am not saying that questioning established narratives is bad.

00:54:01.000 We have to do it.

00:54:03.000 Skepticism is healthy, but a healthy skepticism is rooted in a request for evidence.

00:54:07.000 There is a world of difference between evidence-based skepticism and just stringing together random events or stretching the truth beyond what it can bear.

00:54:15.000 Or speculation.

00:54:16.000 These are not the same thing.

00:54:18.000 Skepticism leads to better understanding through a search for actual truth and evidence.

00:54:22.000 And if you're not doing that, then you're just entering an intellectual rabbit hole from which pretty much nobody returns.

00:54:27.000 So, 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.

00:54:38.000 This is not about left versus right.

00:54:39.000 You see this all across the political spectrum.

00:54:41.000 Like, all across it.

00:54:43.000 The difference That is how we approach all of this.

00:54:45.000 We need to approach all of this with an intellectual rigor.

00:54:49.000 We need to actually be willing to change our minds based on actual evidence.

00:54:53.000 You have to hold your own side to the same standards.

00:54:56.000 And by the way, this is a great way of telling who exactly is lying to you and who is not.

00:54:59.000 If people keep insisting they don't need to provide you evidence, they're just asking questions.

00:55:02.000 Or 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.

00:55:19.000 So 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.

00:55:25.000 Are they asking real questions?

00:55:26.000 Is it a real, serious question?

00:55:28.000 Are they presenting real, serious, credible, verifiable evidence?

00:55:31.000 Are they open to real critiques that might actually correct the theory?

00:55:35.000 If the answer to any of those is no, you might want to click somewhere else.

00:55:38.000 So today, I wanted to have on somebody to talk about the JFK assassination, who literally wrote the book on the JFK assassination.

00:55:44.000 It's Gerald Posner.

00:55:45.000 He'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.

00:55:53.000 Again, 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.

00:55:59.000 But it's fascinating, obviously, to tens of millions of Americans.

00:56:03.000 I sat down with Gerald Posner today to talk over Gerald, thank you so much for stopping by.

00:56:11.000 I really appreciate it.

00:56:12.000 Thanks, Ben.

00:56:12.000 Good to be with you.

00:56:13.000 So I'm really glad you're taking the time.

00:56:15.000 So 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.

00:56:24.000 What I meant by that is that I actually know who killed JFK, and it was Lee Harvey Oswald.

00:56:28.000 And the reason that I don't care about it so much right now is because I know the answer.

00:56:33.000 I used to care a lot about the assassination of the JFK.

00:56:35.000 In 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.

00:56:52.000 And 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.

00:57:03.000 Case 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.

00:57:24.000 I 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.

00:57:36.000 And yet this stuff continues to persist.

00:57:39.000 The evidence record is is overwhelming.

00:57:41.000 The credible evidence on this case in terms of forensics, ballistics, eyewitness testimony, you put it all together.

00:57:47.000 And it's a case that you say this is what happened.

00:57:49.000 It's Lee Harvey Oswald having killed the president.

00:57:52.000 And 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.

00:57:58.000 But 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.

00:58:10.000 There'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

00:58:46.000 think that you're dismissing the idea of a much larger conspiracy.

00:58:49.000 Why aren't you going after the deep state?

00:58:51.000 Why aren't you looking at what the CIA did?

00:58:52.000 Why 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?

00:59:00.000 So people take that as a personal offense to their own judgment about what happened in the case.

00:59:05.000 So let's talk about the evidence in the case and why it is that this thing continues to persist.

00:59:13.000 As you talk about in your book, you go through a wide variety of the various theories that are put forth.

00:59:17.000 Obviously, 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.

00:59:25.000 I want to go through a couple of them.

00:59:27.000 The 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.

00:59:40.000 Talking openly to another associate of LBJ about how they had hired somebody to kill the President of the United States.

00:59:46.000 What do you make of that tape and all this stuff?

00:59:48.000 So first of all, there are about 25 to 28 people that have claimed credit for being the second shooter at Dealey Plaza.

00:59:55.000 They've actually come forward in the past and said, by the way, I was the Grassy Knoll shooter.

00:59:58.000 There are people that put themselves into the history books to try to claim that they've had some role.

01:00:02.000 Carlos Marcello, the mob boss from Louisiana, later claimed, supposedly near the end of his life, that he had a role in killing Kennedy.

01:00:09.000 There's almost a braggadocio to be able to say, oh, yeah, Kennedy, I had him off.

01:00:13.000 I was able to do that.

01:00:14.000 So the same thing happens here with this Mac Wallace tape.

01:00:17.000 This is fantastic.

01:00:18.000 Somebody claims, oh, by the way, LBJ told me that we were working together and we were able to kill JFK at the time.

01:00:24.000 This is supposedly a 1971 recording that is not even the person, Mac Wallace isn't even the person on the tape.

01:00:31.000 His own daughter has said that, as a matter of fact.

01:00:33.000 And all that's said is, by the way, Somebody brought me a tape, that's what Glenn Beck says, from 1971.

01:00:39.000 It looks like it's from 1971.

01:00:41.000 It seems as though it's a tape from that period.

01:00:43.000 This is a fake tape that's been put together to try to claim that LBJ was involved in the assassination.

01:00:49.000 Does it surprise me?

01:00:50.000 No, not at all.

01:00:51.000 I've seen fake stories come up all the time.

01:00:53.000 I see concocted evidence.

01:00:54.000 I see people make up things to try to put into the case.

01:00:58.000 And 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.

01:01:13.000 They would have said, oh, that, by the way, that doesn't have any of the earmarks of real good evidence.

01:01:17.000 They somehow are willing to accept it and then give it the airing that catches millions of other people's attention.

01:01:24.000 Now, 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.

01:01:42.000 The CIA is, of course, another sort of target of the idea that they were behind the JFK assassination.

01:01:46.000 Is there any evidence to that effect?

01:01:48.000 No, not at all.

01:01:48.000 As a matter of fact, what there is evidence of, and this is what I've always said, the CIA, look it, they had Oswald on their radar.

01:01:54.000 Why? Because in 1959, he defected to the Soviet Union in the middle of the Cold War.

01:01:59.000 And guess what?

01:01:59.000 It was in the newspapers.

01:02:00.000 So they opened up a file.

01:02:02.000 They put Oswald into a file.

01:02:04.000 Of course they did, as they did every other defector to the Soviet Union in the heart of the Cold War.

01:02:08.000 And then they kept an eye on him, but not a distant eye.

01:02:10.000 He wasn't very much of interest to them.

01:02:12.000 He came back in the United States.

01:02:14.000 The 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.

01:02:27.000 He thought that they had ruined and bastardized Marxism.

01:02:30.000 He hated the United States, so he was looking now for the new place, and that was Cuba.

01:02:34.000 Then he gets rejected in Mexico City by the Cuban and the Soviet missions.

01:02:40.000 We know that the CIA had to have listening devices, other surveillance on those two missions at the heart of the Cold War.

01:02:45.000 Did they know That Oswald was unhinged as he was when he went to those embassies?

01:02:50.000 We now know what happened because the Soviets have released their own files.

01:02:54.000 The 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.

01:03:09.000 Did the CIA know that he had had that type of behavior?

01:03:12.000 If so, They should have told the FBI when he came back into the United States ten days later.

01:03:17.000 But we know from 9-11, the agencies don't share information very well.

01:03:21.000 The 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.

01:03:30.000 So this is what happens time and time again.

01:03:33.000 Is it a cover-up?

01:03:34.000 Of a murder?

01:03:35.000 No. What the CIA was covering up after with the Warren Commission was its own bureaucratic ineptitude.

01:03:40.000 They 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.

01:03:51.000 Not Kennedy, but Fidel Castro.

01:03:54.000 And they failed seven times, they didn't even wound him.

01:03:57.000 So 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. 0.86

01:04:13.000 It just doesn't happen that way, except in Oliver Stone films.

01:04:16.000 So, 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.

01:04:26.000 How much material has been released on the JFK assassination?

01:04:28.000 Why is Oliver Stone...

01:04:30.000 Non-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.

01:04:42.000 He 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.

01:05:04.000 Who killed Kennedy?

01:05:04.000 You'd sit around a room and say, who was it?

01:05:06.000 The CIA?

01:05:07.000 No, the mob, the KGB.

01:05:08.000 I think it's Oswald.

01:05:09.000 So Stone was able to get away with that.

01:05:11.000 And 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.

01:05:23.000 All of the last 80,000 pages out now, and everyone admits no smoking gun in them after all this time.

01:05:29.000 So what does he want?

01:05:30.000 No smoking guns been released.

01:05:31.000 So he calls on the oversight committee yesterday to say, let's have a new investigation.

01:05:36.000 Look at it all.

01:05:37.000 Let's go through the autopsy and the witnesses and everything else.

01:05:40.000 And I'm thinking to myself, oh my goodness, is there a 911 call, an emergency line that I can call DOJ?

01:05:46.000 Because this is the type of thing they should put a stop to tomorrow.

01:05:49.000 So, let's talk for a second about the brand new conspiracy theory that is now being aired, one that I didn't see coming.

01:05:54.000 And 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.

01:06:01.000 This is a new one.

01:06:02.000 It's rare that you get a new sort of conspiracy theory about an event that happened 60 years ago.

01:06:06.000 But 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.

01:06:21.000 sanction it or because JFK wanted to shut down the nuclear reactor in Israel at Dimona and therefore the Israelis must have done it. 0.61

01:06:30.000 As far as I can see, See, zero evidence has been deduced to this proposition, like literally zero.

01:06:34.000 And yet this has become the hot story.

01:06:35.000 It's now taken as point of fact, actually, by many of the conspiracists online.

01:06:39.000 It's remarkable.

01:06:40.000 Even I could not have suspected that this would be the flavor of the moment, would be Israel did it. 1.00

01:06:45.000 I should have realized that eventually the Jews did it always becomes the conspiracy theory of last resort or first resort. 1.00

01:06:52.000 Sometimes it's the first resort and then it comes back into flavor again.

01:06:54.000 This time it has.

01:06:56.000 And you're absolutely right.

01:06:57.000 Inside 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.

01:07:06.000 And why?

01:07:06.000 Because there is no evidence, because it's a bogus theory.

01:07:09.000 But that hasn't stopped it from being spread around.

01:07:11.000 Some 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.

01:07:21.000 And guess what?

01:07:22.000 What they really should do, if they wanted to, but of course they're not going to spend the time to do this.

01:07:26.000 Israel in 2013, on the 15th anniversary of the assassination, released its own classified files on the assassination.

01:07:33.000 And you say, oh my God, what was in there?

01:07:34.000 That must be fantastic.

01:07:36.000 No, it was the Hebrew, in Hebrew, the actual meetings of Israeli cabinet officials after the assassination.

01:07:43.000 It was fantastic to get a glimpse into what they thought.

01:07:45.000 And guess what?

01:07:46.000 They didn't know what happened.

01:07:47.000 They talked about it.

01:07:48.000 Golda Meir was then foreign minister.

01:07:50.000 She wasn't yet the prime minister.

01:07:52.000 And she says in one point, eight days after the assassination, by the way, I happen to think there are dark forces possibly here.

01:07:59.000 Maybe he was doing it with the Cubans because he's a leftist or because he's a communist.

01:08:03.000 They're trying to figure out what happened and why Jack Ruby killed him two days later.

01:08:07.000 They don't know.

01:08:08.000 But 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.

01:08:19.000 It's fanned, it's said, it's spoken out there.

01:08:22.000 And I see it time and time again.

01:08:24.000 It makes your blood pressure just get crazy because I've seen a lot of crazy theories.

01:08:27.000 But this one has a different effect because it adds on top of already surging anti-Semitism since October 7th.

01:08:35.000 That mixes into a thing where Jews control the world. 1.00

01:08:38.000 They must be behind everything.

01:08:39.000 It's the old Tsarist forgery of protocols of Zion. 0.94

01:08:42.000 And this is a new version of it.

01:08:44.000 They must also be behind the Kennedy assassination. 0.65

01:08:47.000 They're the ones who pulled it off.

01:08:48.000 That's why it's such a perfect crime.

01:08:50.000 I 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.

01:08:58.000 As you point out, there's one factor that's missing there.

01:09:01.000 Among others.

01:09:02.000 The fact that it's missing is, having been through these documents, every redaction was to a foreign intelligence agency.

01:09:08.000 So I've seen redactions to Romanian intelligence, to West German intelligence, to French intelligence, to UK intelligence.

01:09:15.000 I've seen numbers of the people that we had in different embassies who were operatives for the CIA blacked out.

01:09:20.000 I've seen budgets blacked out.

01:09:22.000 That's all the type of information that's been redacted over the years.

01:09:24.000 And one of the redactions Was to Israeli intelligence.

01:09:27.000 The 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.

01:09:38.000 They 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.

01:09:48.000 This is one, it's not just a bogus theory, it's not just something that I can say to you it's laughable.

01:09:53.000 It 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.

01:10:05.000 So let's talk about sort of the dispositive facts that stand behind the fact that it was, in fact, Lee Harvey Oswald.

01:10:11.000 Because there are certain questions that the conspiracists simply can't answer.

01:10:14.000 In fact, most of the questions Are unanswerable, because as you say, the documentary and physical evidence record is overwhelming in this particular case.

01:10:21.000 So 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.

01:10:26.000 What would you say to those people?

01:10:27.000 So 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.

01:10:35.000 Without understanding Oswald, you can't get an idea as to how the assassination happened.

01:10:38.000 And what the conspiracy theorists do, and you know this so well, is Oswald becomes a cipher.

01:10:43.000 They don't discuss him.

01:10:44.000 They talk instead about Angleton, and what about CIA memos, and what was happening in the Cold War, and what should we be doing in this?

01:10:50.000 So everybody thinks, well, who's this fellow, this 24-year-old who was shooting at the president?

01:10:54.000 Why would he do it?

01:10:55.000 And he did say after he was arrested, I'm just a patsy, as Oliver Stone has, so he must have been telling the truth.

01:11:01.000 He didn't just say, oh, by the way, I did commit the assassination.

01:11:03.000 Please send me to death row.

01:11:06.000 It's Oswald himself.

01:11:07.000 Most people don't realize that he was committed to political assassination, and I don't just say that.

01:11:12.000 He had tried to kill somebody in April of that year.

01:11:14.000 A 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.

01:11:25.000 He'd run for the governorship of Texas.

01:11:27.000 Oswald viewed him as the next Hitler.

01:11:30.000 You can argue with Oswald as to whether that was right or not. 0.97

01:11:33.000 It'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.

01:11:39.000 You 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. 0.83

01:11:50.000 You call somebody Hitler long enough, somebody's going to say, I'm going to try to stop him.

01:11:54.000 That's what Oswald thought he was doing with Edwin Walker.

01:11:57.000 She 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. 0.99

01:12:05.000 He's frustrated by that.

01:12:06.000 He's committed to do something.

01:12:08.000 And then he decides to go and join the revolution inside of Havana.

01:12:12.000 He gets rejected and comes back to the United States literally only five weeks before the assassination.

01:12:18.000 But here's the key, Ben, and nobody talks about this.

01:12:32.000 He wouldn't have been there for the assassination.

01:12:34.000 When he's taking the bus ride, it's an overnight bus ride to Laredo, Texas, and then into Mexico City on September 25th.

01:12:40.000 The White House announced for the first time that Kennedy was going to visit Texas.

01:12:43.000 So 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.

01:12:51.000 Oswald tries to get to Havana.

01:12:52.000 He gets rejected.

01:12:53.000 He comes back into Dallas.

01:12:55.000 That 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.

01:13:05.000 Can't do it by telepathy.

01:13:06.000 It can't be done, you know, by some secret message.

01:13:09.000 There's no cell phones.

01:13:10.000 There's no text messages.

01:13:11.000 Where's the telephone call?

01:13:12.000 Where's the secret agent showing up to tell Oswald, by the way, you have to do something and become part of the plot?

01:13:17.000 He gets a job at the Texas School Book Depository before the motorcade route is set.

01:13:22.000 How? Through the CIA?

01:13:24.000 through special operatives, Yeah, I've got a couple of openings.

01:13:38.000 I could put him downtown or maybe at this spot outside of Dallas.

01:13:41.000 Send him down. 0.99

01:13:42.000 They interview him and they put him at the downtown location.

01:13:45.000 And then the Secret Service sets the motorcade route only a few days before Oswald actually sees it in the newspaper.

01:13:52.000 You know, we used to publish the newspaper accounts, right, of where the president was.

01:13:55.000 And the president used to take a motorcade that had a convertible just a week before Dallas.

01:14:02.000 He was in Tampa for the longest motorcade of his presidency, 25 miles in an open air car.

01:14:09.000 So Kennedy used to go into the crowds all the time as he did that day in Dallas.

01:14:13.000 So there were many opportunities to shoot him.

01:14:15.000 And you have to ask yourself one question. 0.99

01:14:17.000 If 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.

01:14:26.000 The president is at a dozen different locations where he's standing still.

01:14:31.000 He's on a stage, he's talking, as Trump was in Butler.

01:14:34.000 When the assassin tried to shoot him, He's not riding in a motorcade.

01:14:38.000 So 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.

01:14:46.000 So he says, I want to do it with a rifle shot.

01:14:48.000 I want to be from a distance. 0.95

01:14:49.000 All right. 0.98

01:14:50.000 So you put him from a distance when JFK is giving a stationary talk and you have Oswald kill him.

01:14:55.000 But instead, the conspirators decide, you know what? 0.58

01:14:58.000 Why 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.

01:15:08.000 You don't do that if you're the conspirators.

01:15:09.000 You do that if you're the lone assassin who's looking for opportunities, the means and opportunity to be able to do it.

01:15:16.000 Oswald 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.

01:15:26.000 Takes it in the next morning in a long paper bag that he tells the person who's driving him in their curtain rods.

01:15:32.000 And then he brings it to the sixth floor of the depository from where the sniper's nest is set up.

01:15:36.000 He's left alone there by six of his co-workers half an hour beforehand.

01:15:40.000 And when the assassination is over, guess who's the only person who leaves the depository?

01:15:45.000 Lee Harvey Oswald.

01:15:46.000 All the rest of the employees are there.

01:15:48.000 Why does he leave?

01:15:49.000 He 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.

01:16:12.000 And 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.

01:16:29.000 If you're willing to look at the credible evidence, here's the more difficult question.

01:16:34.000 Was he shooting the president for his own warped motivations?

01:16:36.000 Or was he doing it as a plot for others?

01:16:39.000 When 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.

01:16:48.000 He was that unstable.

01:16:50.000 But that's a legitimate question.

01:16:53.000 Why is he up there?

01:16:54.000 Once you tackle Sirhan, Sirhan.

01:16:56.000 Once you catch any assassin at the scene.

01:17:00.000 John Hinckley, yeah.

01:17:00.000 Well, Hinckley, we know his motivation.

01:17:02.000 He's the only one who was honest with us, who said, I did actually impress Jodie Foster and guess what?

01:17:07.000 It was right.

01:17:08.000 So that's one of the few cases in which we actually know the motivation.

01:17:11.000 We can say, you know what?

01:17:12.000 In that case, it was correct. 0.83

01:17:13.000 As crazy as it may sound.

01:17:15.000 But in the rest of them, you're always trying to figure out James Earl Ray and others.

01:17:17.000 You're trying to figure out whether they were doing it for themselves or as part of a plot.

01:17:21.000 But 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.

01:17:32.000 That's the part in which you now have a conspiracy that doesn't involve two people, five people, kitchen conspiracy.

01:17:38.000 You have a conspiracy literally of hundreds of people.

01:17:41.000 And somehow...

01:17:43.000 We are to believe that that's the only time in American history that a conspiracy with hundreds of people was kept a secret for 62 years.

01:17:49.000 The perfect conspiracy.

01:17:51.000 You 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.

01:18:00.000 The 007s, the James Bonds of the world, exist on film.

01:18:03.000 They don't exist in reality.

01:18:05.000 So you've spent an enormous amount of time, obviously, looking into the most conspiracized event of the 20th century.

01:18:11.000 But one of the things that's happened is that conspiracy theories have become more and more prominent in American life just generally.

01:18:19.000 And we should differentiate here between actual conspiracies and conspiracy theories.

01:18:22.000 Obviously, there are actual conspiracies in which people get together and they actually do things.

01:18:26.000 And 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.

01:18:38.000 If somebody benefits, it must have been that person.

01:18:40.000 Or 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.

01:18:48.000 Conspiracies are provable.

01:18:49.000 I mean, we have them all the time in court.

01:18:51.000 We actually have an entire RICO Act that is designed to uncover conspiracies and prosecute them.

01:18:55.000 But conspiracy theories themselves, wilder and wilder conspiracy theories, have sort of taken place over time in American life.

01:19:02.000 And you can see it in the polling about the JFK assassination.

01:19:04.000 At the very beginning, a majority of Americans thought that Oswald had not shot the president.

01:19:10.000 It was a bare majority.

01:19:11.000 It's like 53%.

01:19:12.000 Then it drops a little bit.

01:19:13.000 And then in the 70s, it starts to climb and climb really rapidly.

01:19:16.000 And now some 80% of Americans think that it wasn't Oswald who was acting alone.

01:19:20.000 So between 70% and 80% of Americans become sort of the common writ of American public Well, I think there are a couple things.

01:19:29.000 There 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.

01:19:43.000 So, 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.

01:19:50.000 Oswald never had his day in court.

01:19:51.000 The evidence was never presented.

01:19:53.000 People didn't get to see it.

01:19:54.000 If 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.

01:20:03.000 So that was the...

01:20:04.000 The 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.

01:20:12.000 that immediately conjures up the ideas of Dayo the Jackal, a professional assassin.

01:20:16.000 You 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.

01:20:24.000 At least you know who the shooter is.

01:20:26.000 Then you have to figure out whether it's a conspiracy or not.

01:20:28.000 So here you have the long range shot.

01:20:30.000 The assassin gets away in the immediate aftermath of the assassination, and then you're off and running as well.

01:20:34.000 So I get that.

01:20:35.000 In addition, people don't believe in blue ribbon panels anymore.

01:20:39.000 They 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.

01:20:44.000 So I get why those doubts are there.

01:20:47.000 Then it's fed with false information over a period of time.

01:20:49.000 Things are bad.

01:20:50.000 Facts are repeated that are incorrect.

01:20:52.000 You get the House Select Committee in the late 70s, which is a reinvestigation that was great.

01:20:56.000 They 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.

01:21:13.000 By the way, if you listen to it, you don't hear any sounds.

01:21:15.000 They say there's some supersonic impulses here.

01:21:18.000 We think those are bullets.

01:21:26.000 Not. Then Oliver Stone comes in in 91 with his film.

01:21:29.000 I'm amazed that anybody thinks it's Oswald alone, in some ways, because of all of that.

01:21:33.000 But what you said before is key.

01:21:34.000 I 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.

01:21:42.000 So I've lived through consequential conspiracies from lies about Vietnam over a period of time to Watergate.

01:21:48.000 I saw Iran-Contra play out. 0.52

01:21:50.000 I saw what happened that led us into the war in Iraq when we overestimated what was happening on weapons of mass destruction.

01:21:56.000 But what have we had since?

01:21:57.000 We've had the Pentagon Papers.

01:21:58.000 We've had the Panama Papers.

01:22:00.000 We've had the Snowden leaks.

01:22:02.000 We've had WikiLeaks.

01:22:03.000 Not 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.

01:22:11.000 There has to be evidence.

01:22:12.000 You have to say what's the basis beyond speculation.

01:22:16.000 And there's one other thing.

01:22:19.000 People think that if I say Oswald alone killed Kennedy, I'm also saying there was no conspiracy to kill John Kennedy.

01:22:25.000 No. There could have been a conspiracy to kill John Kennedy.

01:22:29.000 Right now, as we're talking, there could be some group of conspirators sitting out and talking about wanting to kill Donald Trump.

01:22:34.000 Or when Barack Obama was in office, or any president, there's probably a group sitting around saying, I'd like to get that president.

01:22:40.000 Whether it's Islamist or whoever, there's a group.

01:22:44.000 So, 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.

01:22:52.000 You 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.

01:23:01.000 What I'm saying is, you need then to tie a piece of evidence into those conspiracies To Lee Harvey Oswald.

01:23:08.000 And that's what's missing.

01:23:09.000 There just isn't any.

01:23:11.000 So Oswald essentially beat any of the potential conspirators to Kennedy.

01:23:15.000 They would have pinned a medal on him.

01:23:17.000 They would have celebrated him.

01:23:19.000 But people assume because one group wanted Kennedy dead, and then another person killed Kennedy, they must be connected.

01:23:25.000 And they get confused between correlation and causation.

01:23:29.000 And they think, ah, the correlation is there.

01:23:31.000 This group wanted him dead.

01:23:32.000 This guy killed him.

01:23:33.000 They must be working together.

01:23:34.000 I always say, just show me the evidence and I'll agree with it, but it's not there.

01:23:38.000 Well, the book is case closed.

01:23:39.000 Everybody should go check it out.

01:23:40.000 General Posner, really appreciate your clarity and thanks for coming on the show.

01:23:43.000 Really appreciate your time.

The Ben Shapiro Show - April 02, 2025

Who Shot JFK?

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