Fifty Years Later: The JFK Assassination

JFK was assassinated on November 22nd, 1963, and fifty years later the majority of the American public doesn't believe the official story from the Warren Commission. But why? Join Ben and Matt as they talk about the lingering questions they found in the JFK case and why conspiracy theories about the murder remain so prevalent in the modern day.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
From UFOs two, ghosts and government cover ups. History is
riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or
learn the stuff they don't want you to know. Greetings,
fellow audiophiles. My name is Matt and I'm Ben that
makes this stuff they don't want you to know. I'm

(00:22):
not behind the camera. I'm in front of a mic today,
which is kind of fun for me. Um, then you're
you're always in front of a mic. Well, you know,
we end up a weird places in our lives depending
on what we do. Uh. We could be people in
front of microphones. We could be clean in streets. We
could be landed on the moon. We could be the
president riding in a motorcade through Dallas on November two three,

(00:47):
And what bad timing that would be for us. Yeah,
that's okay, I'll pass on that one. Yeah. We're talking
today about the assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy. And as
always with these with these episodes, these are our kind
of our show notes, a peek behind the curtain. You
have a little DVD commentary. Yeah, Yeah, we're just hanging

(01:09):
out with some of the questions and and things that
we had. We just today in fact, you and I
filmed a a piece on lingering questions about the JFK assassination. Right, yeah.
I think we called at the top five lingering questions questions. Yeah, yeah,
and we had we had a couple of interesting things there.

(01:31):
What got me is that as we dove into this topic,
I found more stuff than I thought there would be,
and a lot of it not easily debunked. Yeah, not
easily debunked. And and there's so much conflicting information out
there on most of the tiny parts of the subject
that it's tough to know really who to believe, don't

(01:52):
we don't We get that almost every week with every
topic well it Yeah, you know, we get some things
that depend depends on how you look at it. Um,
you know, like the the idea of some international finance shenanigans.
Those often have conflicting information almost anything historical as uh,

(02:15):
conflicting information. Um. We also well we also run into
some that are just clearly bs um. But there's always
some PR firm that will give you a completely different story. Sure, yeah,
we run into that. And there's always some group of
people who will say, for instance, that the world actually
is flat or or a hologram and it was or

(02:38):
hollow um. And we're not saying there aren't extensive cave systems.
But what's interesting about the JFK stuff, Um, I was
thinking about this when we're filming the video. We had
a shot today. What's interesting about the JFK thing is
there was one of the first episodes we tried to
write and we never did it. It was, oh gosh,

(03:01):
I hate using this term, but it was kind of
low hanging fruit in the conspiracy world. But then we
realized it's such a huge topic. You we really had
to break it down. And we've done a couple of
videos on this. The old JFK revisited. Yeah, um, executive
Order eleven. Oh yeah, eleven eleven zero, I think, um,

(03:22):
And that's the theory about that's that's the one where
the argument is that JFK was assassinated because he was
trying to uh regain control of the United States monetary supply,
which as we know, is still now currently controlled by
a I love that air quotes. Do some finger quotes

(03:43):
if you can, while I say this a quasi governmental
banking system, so it sounds so good when you say
it though its government. Yeah, nothing says nothing says trustworthy
and dependable, like quasi you go there. It's like I quase,
I love you, I will clause I be there at noon.

(04:05):
It's a you know, okay, far be it from me
to break in that. But we do have that video
and we ran into some questions here, but just to
just to recap um some stuff that we talked about
that we dug into on that on that video we
shot today. Man, the stuff about the autopsy, it is
frightening to me. Um, that is where we found out

(04:27):
that we we found out this guy named T Jeremy
Gunn I think his name was UM works at the
Assassination Records Review Board or whatever it's called, which is
which is a real thing. First off, that's amazing, and uh,
he's gone through all these pages of documents about all
the declassified pages of documents about JFK's death and people

(04:51):
who are working in the CIA or the FBI at
the time, and then he found out that, um, there's
a lot of strange stuff going on with the UM
with the autopsies and and the body. It's what it's
what Chuck would call hinky. Oh yeah, no, I completely agree,
and that there's some crazy stuff going on there. And
then we looked at the Zuppreuter film. Yeah, and a

(05:13):
lot of the questions about its authenticity, which generally have
been debunked. Um, but there are some pretty interesting theories,
and especially when you watch the videos of the breakdown,
when the Supprefter film has been stabilized in several different ways,
and there are people arguing that it's a composite, that
that the limo was taken out of context, and and

(05:35):
the timing was changed. It's fascinating. It's one of those things.
It's a subject that would have gotten me into conspiracies
if I wasn't already. You know, who else thinks that
JFK was killed by conspiracy? Who feeble Fidel Castro? Oh really?
Because Cuba denied Oswald Lee Harvey Oswald entry into Cuba,

(06:00):
you know, some time before the murder, right, because Oswald,
as we know, died pretty soon after the assassination, and
apparently Castro had conducted some tests with the same rifle.
Said there's no way Oswald could have fired the shots.
Castro was doing his own and they had people doing it. Yeah,
but he did have an independent investigation. And then we

(06:22):
know that the story got This was stuff that didn't
make it into our video to you guys, and we
know the story got moneyed further because people on the
Soviet side we're propagating, uh some misinformation as well. The
Cold War is just crazy, man. I'm still not sure
if it ever ended. I think the world is just
continually in a state of Cold war and like the

(06:44):
lowest amount of conflict is still just constant trash talking,
you know it. That's what the earth is, right, It's
at least when it's underneath the control of humankind, it's
a one massive power struggle for who can rolls of
the resources and who has the biggest guns? Yea, who's
the biggest threat? And we've net we haven't left that

(07:06):
since the feudal ages the biggest kings with the largest
scariest Halbert's Halbert's nice. We've got am. We've got one thing.
One thing that we tackled on the episode that really
blew me away. It was this this idea that there
are still classified documents about JFK fifty years on five decades,

(07:30):
half a century to twenty five year periods. There's there's
got to be something in there. I mean, there's there's
maybe it's only one or two little pieces of information,
but it's it's probably I was gonna say damning, but
I probably can't say that. No, I'm sure you can
say damning because you can use it in that context. Well,

(07:52):
if we leave it in the edit, now we'll both
get bleached. Well you, we'll just find out if if
if Noel thinks we can say damning or not. Who
it's a big hand for our superproducer Noel. But but
but yeah, but there's got it. There's there's got to
be at least one or two gems of terrible information
in there for it to be classified or yeah, maybe,

(08:13):
but it might not relate to the JFK assess exactly.
Maybe it's further reaching having to do with Cold War stuff. Right,
Maybe there's like a CIA operative who is um deep
covers somehow in a way that affects UH still to
this day, that affects US relations to this day, which

(08:33):
which is possible. There's a thing that we found out
about the JFK Act which necessitates the release of all
these documents in two seventeen with a very interesting caveat. Yes,
the President of the United States, whoever it is, at
that time gets to decide. It's their decision whether or
not it's going to be classified or not, and it

(08:55):
goes to it does go to the executive branch. But
it's also possible too for you know, the n s A,
for instance, or the CIA themselves to say, oh, releasing
these documents would be um, a potential threat to national security, uh,
to the military, to our defense budget, to corporate interest

(09:18):
in the Caribbean. Who knows. Yeah, really, any agency that
has the ear of the president, you really can't do this,
it's yeah, And so it's politically advantageous to have these
kind of cut off dates where they say, okay, well,
once it's not secret anymore, will release it. Um. But

(09:40):
my money is on something involving espionage in Russia because
that that makes sense as something that would be kept secret.
But you know who knows it might be It might
be Howard Hunt and uh President Lyndon Johnson or then
not yet President Lyndon Johnson and some Cubans and some

(10:02):
mafia members, uh, just all sitting around eating pizza and saying,
you know who we should shoot though, that would be
that's the best case scenario for me. UM just from
conspiracy theory standpoint, that that it really is this massive,
insane conspiracy that's documented somewhere that the that the CIA

(10:24):
has been holding onto. Usually, yeah, that'd be wonderful. Well,
usually when we see it would be wonderful just to
know the truth. And I think we found a nice
statistic there when the Warren Commission report came out nineties,
something per cent of the public believed it, but then
just a few years later it was down to like
of someone of the U s public believed it, and

(10:45):
now it's ride around of the US public believes the
official story. So the majority of United States residents believe
that there's more to the Kennon the assassination story. Well,
think we've all grown up. I'm thirty years old. Since

(11:06):
I have been able to think, there have been JFK
conspiracy theory shows on television that I've been watching. So
the first I heard of it was the conspiracy theory side,
you know, not from the historical standpoint of just this
is what happened. So I think it's kind of ingrained
in a lot of our minds now that it's that

(11:27):
there's something more to the story, right, and the the
ideas here, I think have just haven't been as fully
explored as they could be rationally. And what I mean
by that is this, uh, the use of the label
conspiracy theory is such a is such a pejorative and

(11:47):
there's a but in this case, that's exactly what it is. Yeah,
but there's a really there's a really interesting document that
comes out, um a little bit after the assassination, when
they're trying to deal with the public relations disaster, they
being government agencies trying to deal with a very traumatized
American public, they have this thing coming out where they

(12:10):
have this document which how I wish I could remember,
where they're talking about how you should label anything that's
not the official story as a conspiracy theory, and they
use the phrase, so I got to tell you man.
To be honest, I do think there is something more
to the story, but I think most of it could
be probably chalked up to espionage things relationships between state

(12:35):
agencies and corporations often connected by mutual family members that
was never supposed to see the light of day. So
it may not be, you know, it may not be
some weird thing where they say, oh the CIA or UM,
I don't know the Mounties killed Kennedy for some reason.
I've never heard that before I'd made it up. I

(12:56):
don't or you know, something like that. It may not
be something about the Kennedy assassination directly. It might be
something like after they concluded their deal to give predatory
lending terms to you know, this uh nation that they
thought might fall to communism, they went ahead and had
United Fruit move in, um, you know, United Fruit found

(13:19):
uh the current dictator to their satisfaction. You know, it
might be something like that, which is equally I mean,
in some ways, it's more it's more frightening. But I
think it's it's very easy for us to to hear
that their documents are still declassified and then think they automatically, Um,

(13:41):
they automatically have proof of a conspiracy. I mean maybe
they do. But if they do, if there really is
a conspiracy, and so when really does have control over that,
then it's not gonna come out while the people who
are around during the assassination are still alive, so it
may be another years. Gosh. Well, to me, this is

(14:05):
this is why I think it piques the interest so much.
It's it's very much like me telling you this big,
long story of all of the things that happened around
some event that affects you at least emotionally. Um, But
then I let you know that there there are a
couple of things that I just I can't tell you

(14:26):
about this situation, and I'm gonna keep them in this
file right here. I'm gonna keep it in my pocket.
You can see it when you're older, and yeah, when
you're mature enough and I think it's safe, I'll tell
you about it, just can you. I mean, that's exactly
what's what's happened, Not exactly, but it's very similar to
what's happened. Well, let's you know, let's end this on

(14:47):
an open question. Uh, listeners, everybody, thank you for listening
to our show getting a little more information. And like
they called it a DVD commentary, that's cool, And here's
our open question. UM, what do you think happened and
Kennedy assassination? Are you one of the people who thinks that, um,
the CIA did it um as a way of removing

(15:10):
or troublesome person who was intended to be a figurehead.
Do you think the banks did it? Do you think
the mafia did it? Do you think it was just Lee,
Harvey Oswald, and then decades of misinformation UM building a
few bungled things into a vast conspiracy Let us know
what you think. We'd love to hear from you. You

(15:31):
can find us on what Are the Ones Met? You
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(15:54):
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