The time has come to say farewell to our ragtag team of commissioners and to close out our ongoing miniseries, The Warren Commission Decided. We wrap things up much as we started them, with Commissioner Gerald R. Ford as our guide. In this episode, with Jerry in the driver's seat, we navigate through the commissioners' executive sessions in roughly chronological order from December 1963 all the way up to when the commissioners presented their report to President Johnson in September 1964. The executive sessions were formal meetings, on the record, in which the commissioners discussed the case, made major decisions, and roadmapped their investigation. It is also where the Commission's chief counsel, J. Lee Rankin, broke the news that Lee Harvey Oswald was an undercover FBI agent.We use the executive sessions as our final dig site because these sessions really showcase what the Warren Commission was all about – covering up any whiff of conspiracy. The executive sessions also show how little these guys cared about getting to the truth. Goal one was to package up a narrative they could sell to the public. As for our boy Jerry, this episode goes even deeper on his almost supernatural ability to rise to the occasion and serve the powers that be. It’s also another great lesson of how all is not what it seems when it comes to Gerald Ford.This one is going to be another two-parter, with Side A available now for free and the full package dropping exclusively on our P@treon imminently. And with that, let's get digging. . .
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1:22:53
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1:22:53
You Don’t Know Jack (Ruby), Part 6–Side B
Here it is folks! The end of the line for our series within a series within a series, You Don’t Know Jack (Ruby). Finally, we reach Jack’s tragic end. Just months after his conviction was overturned in October 1966, Jack was beset with a sudden and rapidly spreading form of cancer that would kill him by January 1967 before he got the new trial he had won. Meanwhile, his strong intimations of a conspiracy were muddled amidst his psychotic ramblings about a honky-tonk Kirstallnacht rampaging through the streets of Dallas. One thing Jack got absolutely right, though, was that the country he grew up in and served in uniform had been taken over by Nazis. He’d never get the chance to speak his truth except as a novelty, and we hope that we’ve done him some justice, warts and all.
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1:36:59
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1:36:59
You Don’t Know Jack (Ruby), Part 6–Side A
It is somewhat bittersweet to say it, but we’ve come to the end of the line with old Jack Ruby, and in this two-part episode, we will close out his saga in style with returning guest and Ruby expert Max Arvo. Side A comes in hot with a deep discussion of CIA mind control experiments, psychopathic psychiatrists, and Jack’s vivid visions of an American Holocaust, leaving his Warren Commission testimony and final denouement for Side B.We pick up where we left off after Jack’s conviction and death sentence. He fires Melvin Belli and hires the lawyer/psychiatrist Hubert Winston Smith to take his case on appeal. He tries to fire the mountain of a man, Joe Tonahill, too, but Joe refuses to go and sticks around. The first order of business after Jack is put on death row (besides filing his appellate papers) is to put him under hypnosis. And who better to do that than the CIA’s favorite super-shrink, Mr. MKULTRA himself, Dr. Louis Jolyon “Jolly” West. Coincidentally or not, Jolly just so happens to show up right after Jack suffers an acute psychotic break, including vivid audio-visual hallucinations. Thereafter, everything Jack says - including (and especially) all of Jack’s talk of a larger conspiracy - is taken with a heaping portion of salt and largely discarded by everyone around him. This is important because, as we’ve previewed heavily in past episodes, Jack’s Warren Commission testimony raises a lot of eyebrows, as we will cover in depth in Side B among other salient and lesser-known aspects of the end of Ruby’s life. If you want to full 3+ hours in one piece, head on over to Patreon and sign up to get early access!
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1:47:59
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1:47:59
The Big Con(gress) 3 - Side B
We know you’ve all been waiting patiently for Side B of the Big Con(gress) 3, and it’s finally here! As a reminder, this series reflects our ongoing exploration of that putrid cesspool on the Potomac, the United States Congress, and this episode is focused on the ongoing genocide in Palestine. With us again is Andrew Myslik, a former congressional staffer and our man in Washington.In Side B, Don refreshes the episode with a newly recorded intro segment that both fills in for the time-lag since Side A dropped and issues a warning against forgetting. The forces of forgetting would like to keep all of us, and all of you, distracted and unable to focus on any of the atrocities being carried out in our name with our money. We must resist that urge. Picking back up with the back end of Don’s and Andrew’s conversation, then, Andrew walks through the process whereby a meager number of members of Congress joined with Rashida, Cori Bush, and others to call for a ceasefire. We consider what it means that this issue divides not only “Democrats,” but even “Progressives” in Congress, as the lies have the upper hand on the truth by a longshot. Finally, we ruminate on the meaning of the recent right-wing embrace of anti-genocide rhetoric with the likes of Marjorie Taylor Greene taking the torch and expressing compassion for Palestinians in Gaza while calling for the torture and imprisonment of Latin Americans here in the U.S. The left cannot let these Nazis occupy the anti-genocide lane, but what can we do to stop them? Join us as we ponder this and many other questions.This episode is just as timely today as it was when recorded last month. Enjoy!
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1:11:53
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1:11:53
You Don't Know Jack (Ruby), pt. 5
This week, we are back with the fifth installment in our miniseries about that amateur dog breeder and professional weirdo turned assassin–Jack Ruby. Having set the table in episodes one through four about the events leading up to Ruby’s big day in court, the time has now come for the trial of the century. And you know we’ve got to don our noided lawyer hats for this one. As always, we take a more expositional approach rather than a bare recitation of the facts and chronology of Ruby’s trial. We do so by doing what we do best—studying the people involved. Because we ended episode four with a focus on Ruby’s defense team, we pick things up in this episode by taking a good, long look at both the district attorney who prosecuted Ruby and the judge who presided over the trial. We also take a look at the witnesses each side decided to put up–a colorful cast of characters that included cops, strippers, and Ruby’s rabbi. With cameras flashing, mics hot, and all of America watching, the Jack Ruby trial was set to be a spectacle for the ages. In the end, the trial was a shit show. And in this episode, we go deep into that shit to bring us all one step closer to knowing Jack.
Do you ever feel like life in the United States doesn’t make any sense? Is the daily barrage of hypocrisy and lies you’re being fed getting to you? Do you feel sick, agitated, or anxious, and don’t know why?
Join your hosts Dick and Don as they excavate the contemporary capitalist hellscape in which we find ourselves in search of the cause of our collective malaise. Follow along as we dig deep into historical persons, places, and events to expose what’s been concealed, and reveal the US-led global order for what it truly is: the Fourth Reich.
South Africa