Ep. 2171 - Who Shot JFK?
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Folks, we've got a lot to get to today on the show. We're going to get into Cory Booker speaking for like 25 hours. Oh my gosh, Democrats are celebrating. And we're going to get into election results from Florida and Wisconsin. And we're going to talk in depth about the assassination of JFK. We can get into that like really in depth today on the show. 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.

The fight is not over because of one bad day at the legislature because it turns out that California said no. Shocker, because that's California. But here's the thing. When we take on a cause, we go all in. We are going to continue fighting on this front. We've won nationally. Now it's time to win in the states. With your support, we can keep covering the issues that matter. We can keep making the content that shapes culture. We can keep making a difference. Join the fight right now at dailywire.com slash subscribe. By the way, I may as well just lead off with this.

Matt did an amazing job. He was testifying before what appeared to be the world's tiniest committee room. 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. Here was Matt doing what Matt does best yesterday.

Compelling women to take part in this untruth is evil, perverse and predatory. If you would use the force of law to compel young girls to use a changing room with a boy, you are yourselves predators. Transgenderism is a lie. It is in fact the most deranged lie that mankind has ever invented. In a free country, nobody should ever be forced to participate in a lie.

As lawmakers, you have an obligation to the truth. It is a truth that I know you all recognize because every human who has ever lived on earth recognizes it, that men are men and women are women. It is that simple. And the question before you is just as simple. The question is this. Will you side with the truth, a truth so basic that every toddler understands it, or will you disgrace yourselves by denying it?

That is your choice to make. 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. This is a major issue and Democrats have been disconnected from reality. That disconnect from reality doesn't mean they'll never win another election. Yesterday, there were some election results out of Florida and Wisconsin. The election results out of Florida are good. The election results out of Wisconsin

were not good. The election results out of Florida, there were two districts in which the Congress people either took another job or retired from their district. One was Matt Gaetz's district. Jimmy Petronas ended up winning that seat, holding it for Republicans. And then there was Mike Waltz's district. He, of course, is the national security advisor. His district, Florida six.

is a R plus 30 district for President Trump. And Randy Fine, who's a state senator here, ended up winning. That was expected to be a pretty close race. It turned out not to be a particularly close race. I was involved in a tele town hall that we did just before the election. 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. So both of those are holds for Republicans. That is good news. 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.

Scott Walker did that years ago. That could easily be reversed by a liberal Supreme Court. 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.

All of this despite the fact that Elon Musk put gigantic tens of millions of dollars investments in that Wisconsin Supreme Court election. The liberal judge in this particular case, Judge Susan Crawford, secured a victory, obviously.

The state Supreme Court race was technically nonpartisan, but it set a spending record for a U.S. judicial contest. Wisconsin awarded Trump his narrowest state margin in November, and the race was closely watched for how swing state voters have digested the 10 weeks since his inauguration. It's very difficult to tell, by the way, in special elections how people are actually going to vote in a presidential election.

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. Usually only the base turns up and like the base of the base. Democrats are trying to suggest that this is the beginning of their comeback. 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. Now, again, she was replacing a liberal justice in Wisconsin. Crawford's win means the court keeps that 4-3 liberal majority.

Crawford won pretty handily with 98% of the expected vote counted. She was leading Schimel 55 to 44. Brad Schimel was the Republican candidate for the judiciary there. 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 point. So again, yeah, I don't think you can read this as a broad national trend and Democrats still have an uphill battle. Speaking of which they are lacking any sort of real leadership at the top of the democratic party. So Cory Booker, who once ran for president, I know you forgot about that. He actually did. He ran for president and he totally flamed out because he's a big weirdo. And Cory Booker has been a big weirdo for a long time.

As I've said before about Cory Booker, he is the least authentic politician perhaps I have ever seen. I call him Mr. Potato Head because in his back pocket, he has angry eyes. And every so often, in the middle of a speech, he will go, take out, Mr. Potato, take out your angry eyes. He'll take out his angry eyes and...

And there was a lot of that yesterday because he spoke for 24 hours. He spoke for 20. He wasn't filibustering anything, by the way. This isn't Mr. Smith goes to Washington where he's filibustering a bad piece of legislation. 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. Apparently, the question everybody was asking, of course, was,

The Mike Mulligan question, how does he poop? The answer apparently is that he dehydrated himself. He talked about this, that he didn't eat for like a day before and then he stopped drinking maybe 10 hours before. So he was totally dehydrated and somewhat deranged. And then he stood there and he spoke and Democrats are like, this is amazing.

It's just amazing. That man stood there and he spoke for 24 hours. For 24 hours, he just stood there and he spoke. That's true heroism. And every human being on planet Earth went, well, I have like a friend of my spouse's who speaks like that. And they're really annoying. And that's really what it was. So here was Mr. Potato Head. He popped in those angry eyes and ranted about Trump for like 24 hours. To call to the conscience of this nation.

to say I will not stand for another American to lose their healthcare for a billionaire. I will not stand for another veteran who's dedicated to stopping the suicide of other veterans to lose their job. I won't stand for the air quality in my community to be worse because they're letting polluters pollute more. I won't stand for the collective assaults 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." When is it going to be enough? My voice is inadequate. My efforts today are inadequate to stop what they're trying to do. But we, the people, are powerful. We are strong. We have changed history. We have bent the arc of the moral universe. And now is that moral moment again. It's the moral moment again.

God bless America. We need you now. God bless America. If you love her, if you love your neighbor, if you love this country, show your love. Stop them from doing what they're trying to doing for almost 20 hours. We have laid out what they're trying to do 20 hours. I want to stand more, and I will, but I'm begging people, don't let this be another normal day in America.

Oh, good Lord. He went for a little over 25 hours. The reason he went for a little over 25 hours, again, like slow clap for that ridiculous performance by Cory Booker, a laughably bad performance by Cory Booker. 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.

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. So he did do that. So I guess congratulations for talking for a super long time, politician who says nothing for a living. That's really inspiring, inspiring stuff. By the way, Cory Booker, we should note, was an opponent of the filibuster. He's an opponent of the filibuster because he thinks the filibuster is a Jim Crow holdover.

But now when he's doing it, when he's doing it, it's totally great. If that sort of thing is your bag, I suppose that, you know, good for you, but

By the way, this is an amazing way for senators to actually make a name for themselves. Obviously, we've seen this in the past. Senator Rand Paul did a really long filibuster with regard to the droning of a terrorist who was also an American citizen years back. And Ted Cruz, of course, did a filibuster against Obamacare. And now you have Senator Cory Booker doing this because he, of course, has presidential aspirations to grab the leadership of the party. And there's nothing at the top of the Democratic Party. They're treating this as though this is some act of corruption.

tremendous self-sacrifice that he didn't have to calf himself for 25 hours or something. 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 Ron Thurmond for the longest Senate speech on record in an act of astonishing stamina that he framed as a call to action. A s...

Don't shake down because he stood for 24 hours and yelled at the walls. Wow. Good for him. I'd like to introduce him to my toddler daughter who can do precisely the same thing. I've seen her basically stay awake for 24 hours yelling at us. It's happened. So good for Cory Booker, equaling the achievement of every small child who won't go to bed at three o'clock in the morning and is caterwauling about missing her Barbie.

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. Oh, the heroism. Oh, oh, God bless America.

In a show of physical and oratorical endurance, he lasted past sunset on Tuesday. 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. So congratulations to two Democrats on really, really long filibusters.

He finished by quoting John Lewis, the civil rights hero and congressman. 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 to, I want you to redeem the dream. Let's be bold in America.

And then he said, to hate him is wrong. He's talking about Strom Thurmond. To hate him is wrong. 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. I'm not here, though, because of his speech. I'm here despite his speech. So, I mean, he clearly was aiming at like, oh, my gosh, Guinness Book of World Records. Here is your certificate, Mr. Booker. You can put it right there on your wall next to the guy who made the largest card house. Just really amazing.

impressive stuff. 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. Today, that vision seems distant. Big tech dominates our digital lives with companies, not just serving ads, but potentially influencing political choices through controlled content delivery. The original internet promised personal freedom and control over your information journey. There's a way to reclaim that control and freedom, ExpressVPN. When you browse the internet,

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Democrats looking for a moment. They are just beyond stunned by the bravery. Senator Adam Schiff, another gigantic intellect of towering proportions of California, he got up to call Booker a towering intellect, which, yeah, my dude, I'm going to go no on that one. It's a no from me, dog. Here's Adam Schiff.

I thank you for being here. 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. I have so many jokes right now. So many jokes, and I will not tell any of them. Chuck Schumer, 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. And in the meantime, according to the New York Times,

Mr. Booker's staff members jumped into action. Kleenex for dabbing sweat from his brow was replenished. My God. I mean, it really is just impressive. Just so impressive. Like D-Day, basically. A fresh binder, thick with printed material, was placed on the podium. With printed material. Can you believe it? Representatives who had crossed the Capitol from the House filtered in, drawn by the spectacle. They arrived, lingered, departed, each bearing witness to the endurance test unfolding. I love the New York Times writing here.

Honest to God, whoever wrote, who wrote this totally crappy piece? Seriously. I want to name, this is a three author article. So I just want to name all three authors of this poetic nonsense. Tim Balk, Mike Ives, and Matthew M. Polk Big. I would, I would really like for you guys to take a bow. I'd like for you to take a bow. Really solid stuff.

Mr. Thurman had sustained himself by sipping orange juice and munching on bits of beef and pumpernickel. 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. He had prepared for the speech by fasting for days, he told reporters on Tuesday night after the speech. Before he began on Monday, he had not had food since Friday or water since Sunday. 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. Instead of figuring out how to go to the bathroom, he said, I ended up, I think, really unfortunately dehydrating my

During the speech, he recalled, he really started to cramp up. I'm sorry, he wasn't running a marathon, guys. It turns out this is the Senate. Sir, this is a Wendy's. Oh my gosh. Oh my God. It's just, 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. Senator Chris Murphy, another clown from Connecticut, he said it's a stunning biological feat. Okay, can we like, a stunning, is he a triathlete?

He stood there and he talked for 24 hours. Like, congrats to him. Really stunning biological. I understand that the average age in the United States Senate is 178 years old. 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. A stunning biological feat. Truly stunning. Okay.

He gets no bathroom breaks. I went through this for 15 hours. It's different for 24 hours. No bathroom breaks. Can't sit down, can't even move from his desk or he loses his right to remain on the floor. So, yeah, a pretty a pretty stunning biological feat being pulled off by Cory Booker on the floor of the Senate right now.

Oh my goodness, these people. I do, I love that the best they can do is get Mr. Potato Head to jabber at you for 25 hours. This is how badly they are doing right now. They can't stop anything. They can't actually push an agenda that makes any sense to Americans. But what if we have a guy whose job it is to talk, talk for a super long time while standing there? Then will you be convinced? Then will you be convinced? The reality is that the only hope for Democrats right now is for Trump to fall on his face. That's really the only thing that can save Democrats right now

They, of course, are hoping very much for the economy to collapse. Later today, President Trump is scheduled to make his announcement about what exactly is going to happen with the Liberation Day tariffs.

Right now, investors seem, you know, kind of skittish. It's not clear exactly where their heads are at on what Trump is going to do. They seem a little bit more sanguine, frankly, than I think that they ought at this point. But according to the Wall Street Journal, stocks calm this week shows investors continue to bet that clarity on trade will bring stability to markets.

Major indices have retreated since President Trump began hiking duties on the country's largest trading partners, not nearly as much as would be expected if investors thought the economy was barreling toward a recession. As of Tuesday afternoon, the S&P 500 was down around 8% from its all-time high reached in February. It has ticked up over the past couple of days, extending a rebound off its lows from just a few weeks ago.

So what are the reasons for this? One, investors' continued confidence that Trump won't stick with any tariff policy that would cause a serious drag on growth. Again, I've made that case myself, 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. Two, their view that they need to see more signs the economy is actually in trouble before they bet on a recession. And three, a belief that as we get more information, there will be more certainty in the markets. So we are going to find out

In recent days, according to the Wall Street Journal, analysts at Goldman Sachs forecast the effect of 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. That bank now sees a 35% chance of recession over the next 12 months, up from 20% previously. But again, everything is sort of up in the air at this point. The White House continues to preach confidence about whatever tariffs are going to come out. And again, we have no idea. President Trump loves a surprise announcement. It is his M.O.,

Here is Caroline Lovett at the White House saying whatever he does is going to work, which of course is her job. And you said that the president right now is with the trade and tariff team. They are very confident that this is all going to work. But what if they're wrong? They're not going to be wrong. It is going to work. And the president has a brilliant team of advisors who have been studying these issues for decades. And we are focused on restoring the golden age of America.

So, again, that's her job. Energy Secretary Chris Wright, he says that the plan here is to get everybody else to lower their tariffs. Again, if this is the plan, I'm in. Sounds great. Everybody lowers their tariffs. Free trade for all. Great distribution of products. Excellent supply chains. Lower prices for American consumers. All the tariffs on us stop so we can actually start exporting more. Sounds great. Here's Chris Wright making this case.

What you're going to see is tariffs on U.S. exports come down across the world. President Trump's message has been free and fair trade, reciprocal trade. I'm talking to foreign leaders all the time, and they want two key things. They want to buy more American products. I'm talking to them mostly about energy, and they want to invest more dollars in the United States. So, again, his mouth to God's ears.

The problem is it could easily go the other way. So there are a couple of different paths that this could take.

Israel is taking one path. The EU is taking another. So Israel is immediately ending all tariffs on all American products, which is great. That sounds awesome. That is a great way to get other countries to do that sort of thing. And that's what I'm hoping that Trump is doing here. It's leverage to get everybody else to lower their tariffs. According to the Times of Israel, Finance Minister B'Tel Osmotrich 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 a reprieve from the Trump administration's levy of reciprocal duties expected to be announced on Wednesday. I guess the idea is

ain't no reciprocal duties if we ain't got no duties. The order was coordinated with Prime Minister Netanyahu and Economy Minister Nir Barkat. It's subject to final approval by the Knesset Finance Committee. That is one approach. The EU is taking a totally different approach, which is we're going to tariff the living crap out of the United States.

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. 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. Universal tariffs soon followed on steel, aluminum, and then on cars.

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. The idea is to mirror the response. 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.

EEC President Ursula von der Leyen, the European Commission, she said, So what exactly could that involve? 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.

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. So things could get heavy very, very quickly. It remains to be seen exactly what Trump is proposing or what is going to come down the line. So we will wait to see that come down later this afternoon. Meanwhile, controversy continues over President Trump's immigration plans. Trump can't stop and will not stop 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. 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. And those migrants included 10 Salvadoran and seven Venezuelan men who were previously being held at Gitmo.

Meanwhile, controversy again has broken out over the case of this supposed Maryland father. That's how he was described by The Atlantic. Was this guy actually a member of MS-13, an immigration judge? So there's credible evidence that he was some six years ago. Caroline Lovett was asked about this particular story, as we talked about yesterday in The Atlantic, about a supposedly innocent American.

Salvadoran immigrant who had a stay on his removal because theoretically he was going to be tortured in El Salvador if he went back. And the administration made an administrative error and deported him and now they can't get him back. Here's Caroline Levitt saying, well, it's an administrative error. That doesn't mean the guy should be in the United States.

The error that you are referring to was a clerical error. It was an administrative error. 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. That is fact number one. Fact number two, we also have credible intelligence proving that this individual was involved in human trafficking. And fact number three,

Okay, and she is right about all of those things, presumably. You know, more evidence to show who this guy was would obviously help the administration's case. But as we mentioned yesterday, the Atlantic kind of ignored a huge part of the story.

Meanwhile, Secretary of State Marco Rubio is ordering diplomats overseas to scrutinize social media of applicants for student and observant

and other types of visas, basically saying you don't get in the country if you hate the West, which seems, you know, pretty fair. It seems like a good way to screen out people who should not be in the United States in the first place. Like if you're here spreading pro-terrorist content, what exactly are you doing in the United States? We don't need more of you. So Secretary of State Rubio is pursuing that. Meanwhile, Democrats taking the wrong side of the 2020 issue, as always, Representative Jamie Raskin, he's demanding the return of illegal immigrants.

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.

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 Trenadaragua reentering the United States to make Jimmy Raskin feel better about his life. Again, President Trump continues to operate on solid bases with the American public. 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. I'm very hopeful that the president today is going to announce tariffs that are less

and scoped in the kinds of tariffs that he's talking about. 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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Task Force on the Declassification of Federal Secrets held yet another proceeding on the JFK assassination. Now, you ask yourself, why exactly is there another hearing on the JFK assassination? 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. 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. 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.

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. So yesterday, the House Republicans decided they were going to have an Oliver Stone as an expert on the JFK assassination, which is an absurdity. It's an absurdity. JFK, the film.

which is, in fact, an incredibly well-produced film because Oliver Stone is a terrific director. It's a load of tripe. JFK, the movie, is just crap in terms of historical accuracy. It's absolute sheer nonsense. I know this because it was the JFK movie that got me into looking into this. I remember watching this in law school. And when I watched it in law school, I thought, wow, this is fascinating. What a great movie. And then I started reading pretty much everything I could get my hands on about the JFK assassination.

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.

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. Once I know how the trick was done, then it's no longer an interesting trick. 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. 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. And yet, still, the Republican members of Congress, many of whom seem to enjoy kind of swimming in the swamps of conspiracy theories, they went deep yesterday. Here was Lauren Boebert questioning Oliver Stone while thinking that he was

Another non-credible source on the JFK assassination, Roger Stone. Here's how it went yesterday. Mr. Stone, you wrote a book accusing LBJ of being involved in the killing of President Kennedy. Did these most recent releases confirm or negate your initial charge? Being involved in the assassination...

President Kennedy. No, no I didn't. If you look closely at the film, there's no... It accuses the President Johnson of being part of a complicit and a cover-up of the case. Mr. Morley, I think you had something to add on that?

I think you're confusing Mr. Oliver Stone with Mr. Roger Stone. Sorry. It's Roger Stone who implicated LBJ in the assassination of the president. It's not my friend Oliver Stone. I may have misinterpreted that and I apologize for that.

Now, again, do I think that Oliver Stone should be your credible House committee source on the JFK assassination? I don't. 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. So here's the thing.

I'll take a step back for a moment. Right now, conspiracy theories are running wild on X about virtually every possible topic. Now, there's a difference between a conspiracy and a conspiracy theory. A conspiracy is a thing that actually exists in the real world. In fact, we have an entire statute devoted to uncovering conspiracies and prosecuting.

That'd be the RICO Act. It was an act directly tied to the idea of conspiracy connected to crime. And so there are lots of conspiracies. 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. 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.

That is true because there are emails showing that Anthony Fauci did that exact thing. 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. The evidence makes it not a conspiracy theory, but a conspiracy theory.

Conspiracy theorists, however, that's a different thing. And conspiracy theories are a different thing. Conspiracy theories aren't just creeping into the fringe anymore. They're staging a full-blown takeover in the public square. You've seen it pretty much everywhere. 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. This isn't skepticism, conspiracy theories. They're not skepticism. Skepticism is a theory.

Skepticism would be that you question a thing and look for the evidence. Not skepticism is where you question a thing and don't look for any evidence before you throw out a theory that is not backed by the evidence. This isn't skepticism. Conspiracy theorizing is not skepticism. It is usually intellectual cowardice dressed up as critical thinking.

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 fan fiction trumps reality. And again, there are people who are in the basement on the keyboards who are actually doing real hard, good work that's important if they're basing it on the evidence. But that's not happening right now. In order for us to have a functioning polity, you have to have a common set of facts.

Conspiracy theories are directly tied to no facts. 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. This is what I call the QED of conspiracy thinking. It's a simple framework. Q is for fake questions, E is for fake evidence, and D is for fake defenses.

So this framework is designed to expose the intellectual dishonesty at the core of conspiracy thinking. And once you see it, it's difficult to unsee it because you'll see these tactics almost everywhere with regard to people retailing particular narratives. So let's dive in. First, Q, fake questions. The fake questions are the foundation of conspiracy theories. The first pillar in the conspiracy theory playbook are fake questions. These are not genuine inquiries that are seeking truth or evidence or

or facts. They're rhetorical devices designed to create doubt, even where there's no evidence that the doubt should exist. So the most obvious example of this is just asking questions. This is when somebody poses a loaded question while they're pretending to be a neutral observer. So say, I'm just asking questions. Why won't the government discuss the second shooter on the grassy knoll in the JFK assassination? Why can't we even talk about the JFK assassination?

Okay, the question presupposes a premise. One, there's somebody trying to hide the truth from you. Two, that they're trying to silence you. And many of the people who use this kind of stuff are speaking to literally millions of people. So why can't we talk about the JFK assassination? 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. 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. So the just asking questions is a rhetorical sleight of hand.

Here is the problem. The tactic puts the burden of proof on the wrong side. So typically in logical discourse, if I make a contention, I have to provide evidence of my claim. I can't just make a claim and then ask somebody else to disprove it. So if I'm going to debate and I make a claim, I should have evidence to back the claim. 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 of proof is 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. That's how an actual conversation typically works. But that's not what's being done here. Okay, next tactic in the just asking questions section. Motive over evidence. 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. And they show no actual connection between the person and the outcome. But if you benefit, then you must have done it.

So Lyndon Johnson became president after JFK died. Therefore, he assassinated JFK. That is not an actual logical piece of reasoning. It wouldn't pass muster in a freshman logic class. Motive may suggest where to look for evidence, but it is not evidence itself. By the conspiracy theory's 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. You benefiting from a thing does not mean that you did the thing.

Even you benefiting from a bad thing. If your aunt dies and leaves you a million dollars, it doesn't mean you murdered your aunt. Then there's the appeal to ignorance. This one is particularly insidious. And you see this all the time, particularly in the interwebs. And this is arguing that something has to be true because it hasn't been definitively disproven. And here's the thing. You can't very often definitively disprove anything. I can make a case, as Richard Dawkins suggests, there's a spaghetti monster controlling all of human activity.

Okay, if I say there's a spaghetti monster controlling all of human activity, disprove it. Okay, there's no way to disprove it. And then you say, well, I'm not even claiming there's a spaghetti monster who's doing this sort of stuff. I'm just saying it might happen. Can you disprove that? Well, this fundamentally misunderstands how knowledge works. The absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, but neither is it evidence of presence. The burden of proof lies with the person making the extraordinary claim. And then there's the you don't know the whole story tactic. This is a classic.

This is when somebody who is, again, retelling a conspiracy theory implies that there's hidden knowledge only the initiates can access. And so you'll hear people say, they're not telling you everything. Do your own research. Now, of course, this is effective because sometimes people aren't telling you everything and you should do your own research. But the thing is, nobody knows everything about complex events. The conspiracy theory exploits that gap to insert a preferred narrative.

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 like wrote several books of credible evidence on the thing, but you shouldn't trust him. You should do your own research.

And when people say this, typically what they mean is you shouldn't do your own research. You should listen to me because you're not going to do your own research. You might come to it from instead. Just listen to the theory that I'm retailing because I have done the research, which typically is rarely true. OK, now on to the second step. These are all the fake questions. Now we get to fake evidence. And this is how you structure a conspiracy theory.

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. So one tactic is cherry picking and secret sources. Cherry picking data or claiming secret sources, really great way of doing this. 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.

So they will say, did you know that Trotsky was a Jew? And that means that the Soviet tization of Russia was a Jewish plot. Now, Lenin wasn't a Jew. Stalin wasn't a Jew.

Tons of people in the Soviet infrastructure were not Jews, and even those who claimed Jewish background were not observant Jews in any way. But again, you're not going to hear about any of that because you're cherry-picking that. This very often will happen when you're attempting to credit a group with outsized power. You'll say, man, have you seen how many Jews there are in Hollywood? And it's true. There are a lot of Jews in Hollywood. Also, there are a lot of not Jews in Hollywood. Also, there are very few religious Jews in Hollywood.

And you can do this with pretty much anything. You just cherry pick one thing and ignore all of the rest of the things. 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? They redacted Israel in those 80,000 pages of JFK? Yes, well, it turns out they also redacted Romanian intelligence. They redacted Western German intelligence. They redacted pretty much all the intelligence agencies. But if you don't know that, then it looks like, oh, that is pretty suspicious. Have you checked lately to see if your home's title is still in your name?

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Get a free title history report and access your personal title expert, a $250 value when you sign up at HomeTitleLock.com and use promo code DailyWire. That's HomeTitleLock.com, promo code DailyWire. Okay, so now let's talk about alleged secret sources. So you hear this all the time, right? I have a friend who works for the government, a credible person. This person told me, this person told me, and I believe that person. 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, right?

In actual journalism and academic research, you have to have multiple sources that confirm a thing. 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. 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. You wouldn't want them to get in trouble. Other false evidence. This would be false cause. This is rampant.

So what they will do, people who are retelling conspiracy theory, is they will take two correlative events that are not causative. So I'll say the government conducted a training exercise near New York and then 9-11 happened. These are connected. It is a very basic post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy because one thing followed another. Therefore, the first thing caused the second thing. So I wore my lucky socks and my team won. Therefore, my socks caused my team to win.

That is not an actual argument. Correlation has to be proved to be causative, not just correlative. Appeal to authority. 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. 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. This has opened the door to a bunch of people who will now basically term anyone an expert on a topic. 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 and claiming expertise.

Is really quite easy in today's modern world. 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. 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. This is why evidence becomes more important. Not less important. If you don't trust the experts. Then you should ask for the evidence across the board. This should be a way of saying. Don't cite your authorities. I won't cite my authorities. Just bring the evidence.

That would be a way, but people don't bring the evidence. They cite some sort of expert who is saying something out of the box, and I don't know enough to actually question them. I know enough to question the narrative, but I don't know enough to question them. And they're an expert. That is a cheap and easy way of avoiding responsibility for the theory that you are retailing. And again, you see this all the time.

Another tactic here is overestimating coordination. 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. It's sort of like how Copernicus rewrote the rules of how the universe worked by discovering how they work because it was simple.

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

The same thing is true of most conspiracy theories. Most conspiracy theories have to get more and more and more complex. So let's say you believe that the moon landing was faked. Okay, that would not require a few dozen people to be in on it. That would require thousands, probably tens of thousands of people to be in on it and maintain a perfect lie for literally decades. So question, have you ever tried to organize a surprise party? Like just for a friend.

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. Multiply that complexity by 1,000, and you don't know any of these people, and they're part of a government organization, for example, and you think that nothing is going to leak ever? People talk. They make mistakes. They have crises of conscience. Usually conspiracies that are successful are relatively small, and then they become open when they're still relatively small and they gain power.

So, for example, the Soviets, the original Soviet, was a conspiracy of people who were pretty open about their ambitions. It started off secret, pretty quickly became not secret, and then they expanded their ambition. But the idea that you can have a secret, massive conspiracy involving tens of thousands of people across decades, now you're straining rationality. And then there's sort of us versus them thinking.

This is basically, you label, this isn't even an appeal to evidence at all. 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. And if you're a credulous dupe and you don't believe us, then you're the them. You're a sheeple.

You're a sheeple. This is a great way of simply alienating everybody who doesn't agree with you and calls for evidence. It's because you must be a part of it. It's you. It's very emotionally satisfying because you feel like you're in the know. You feel like you've gained the secrets of the universe. But it's totally intellectually stunting. The truth is that reality is really complex. Most events result from a mixture of interest.

intentional actions, unintended consequences, systemic factors, lots of random chance. That's life. You know that in your own life. Reducing that complexity to heroes and villains makes for great movies, but it makes for really, really bad analysis. And then there is confirmation bias and something called apophenia. Confirmation bias is where you interpret information in a way that confirms your preexisting beliefs. So if you believe in a conspiracy, everything becomes evidence for the conspiracy.

Any contradictory evidence, you just dismiss it as part of the cover-up. So let's say that you believe that JFK was assassinated by the mafia. And then it turns out that actually Oswald didn't have any ties to the mafia. You say, well, that's just because we haven't looked hard enough. And anybody who makes that claim is probably in on it. And then you pair that with apophenia, which is seeing meaningful patterns in random data. And this happens all the time. Human beings, our brains, they look for patterns. But as sort of the famous joke goes, conspiracy theorists see words in their Cheerios.

And so you can do this really easily. And you see the media actually do this sometimes. These three unrelated politicians all visited the same city in different years. It must be a conspiracy. 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. Okay, finally, so we've done the fake questions, the fake evidence, and you finally get to the fake defenses. And this is where somebody asked for evidence just over and over. What's your evidence? Show me the evidence.

And so now you need a defense. 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. One is non-falsifiability. The hallmark of pseudoscience, things that are not scientific. And again, there are many things in life that are not scientific. That's fine. You can't falsify love, for example. It's a personal feeling. But when it comes to claims about the world itself, you should have a falsifiable theory. As Karl Popper, pointing this out, the philosopher, said,

Conspiracy thinking is non-falsifiable. You structure a claim so it can never be proved false. A good theory makes predictions that could be disproven. I've asked this to – you heard me ask this about the Derek Chauvin trial to, for example, Stephen A. Smith. I said, is there any evidence that could possibly change your mind about this? And he said no. I said, well, that's not a rational inquiry because if nothing can change your mind about a thing, it is now a religious belief. It is not a rational inquiry. And there's a place in life for religious beliefs.

But that's not the place for unspooling a theory about, you know, like an assassination. Conspiracy theories rarely do this because their theories are designed to be immune to evidence. They don't want to actually provide a falsifiable thing. Then there's moving the goalposts.

When it comes to global warming, for example, global warming, there are a couple of things you can say that are plausible and falsifiable. One, is the world getting warmer over time? Two, does it correlate with human activity with regard to carbon? The answer to both those is yes. What is the level of causation is still an open question. What is a conspiracy theory is where they said the world's going to end in 2012.

And then it doesn't end in 2012, Greta Thunberg style. And then you're like, okay, well, and she's like, well, I really meant 2024. And then it doesn't end. And then it's like, well, what I really meant was 2036. You see this in Nostradamus a lot. Okay, we'll just move the timeline out. Just move the timeline out. Okay, well, usually in the real world, if you have a predictive fail, you have to revise your theory. In conspiracy thinking, you simply revise the prediction. One of the most common tactics here is circular reasoning.

So what you say is we know that you're corrupt because you won't report on this conspiracy theory. And we know the conspiracy is real because you won't report on the conspiracy theory. It's a closed logical loop. No external information is possible. You're lying because the conspiracy theory is true. The conspiracy theory is true because you're lying.

And around the circle you go. And at no point does evidence ever enter the equation at any point. Then there's the Kafka trap. The Kafka trap is named after Franz Kafka's short story, The Trial, where denial of guilt is taken as evidence of guilt. 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 probable. Say that, ah, because you're involved in the conspiracy. That's why.

So it goes directly, it's a character attack, essentially. It makes the accusation on false survival because whether you deny or whether you confirm, both take it as confirmation. Denial, silence, and confirmation are all the same under the Kafka trap. 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. And if you confirm it, it's because it's true. And if you stay silent, it's because you won't answer because it's probably true. That's the Kafka trap.

There's information overload as well. So you see this a lot. One challenge for evidence, what you will get is a bunch of unrelated gobbledygook facts that are stacked on top of each other super fast. That sort of thing is very difficult to combat because it's sort of the equivalent of a terrorist rocket barrage. It's a bunch of $50 rockets that are sent up, 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. That has nothing to do with the central argument.

but is incredibly time consuming. And so people just sort of give up to defending the truth because it's so tiring. Again, good tactic, bad logic. Another tactic here, weaponizing doubt. Conspiracy theorists excel at weaponizing doubt. 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. So they'll say, well, you know,

There were initial reports from the government. They got the time wrong by five minutes. That means the whole report is BS. The whole report is flawed. This usually comes right after an event. So right after a complex event is reported, there are usually errors. 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. Wait 48 hours to comment on it because usually it takes a while for the truth to be established.

But what usually happens is people jump to a conclusion. That conclusion is then used to discredit the actual truth because somebody made a mistake when they first reported the thing. And then there is false equivalence. Again, this is a defense mechanism for a bad conspiracy theory where you say all sources are equally biased.

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. Okay, well, yes, the legacy media does lie. That does not mean that all people are equally dishonest or that all cases are equally verifiable or have equal veracity. You have to actually establish this by the evidence.

The reality is that people say, oh, I don't after COVID, I don't trust my doctor. I promise you that if you break your leg, you trust your doctor much more than you trust the random guy in the Internet who may have been right, by the way, about the COVID vaccine. Because the reality is that it depends what you're talking about. Depends the topic. It depends the level of expertise. Trying to equate everything to flatten everything is a great way of making everything unfalsifiable.

Another tactic, the no true Scotsman tactic. This is where somebody says no true conspiracy researcher would deny the moon landing was faked, right? Which allows the community to maintain ideological purity. You just exclude a dissenter. You say that person is not actually a member of our community. They're not pure enough. Okay, then there is the deep play and the Martin Bailey. Again, you see these tactics all the time. The deep play is really devious. This is where every debunking becomes evidence of a deeper conspiracy.

So the fact that the legacy media is so intent on focusing on this theory, it shows that they're hiding something. 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. And then there's the Mott & Bailey tactic. So this is usually where somebody...

We'll make a totally implausible claim like the government is run by lizard people. And you're like, well, that's not true. The government is not run by lizard people. And then they will say that that would be the Bailey, like the outside of a castle. And then when that's overrun, they'll say, well, I'm just claiming that the government lies to us sometimes. OK, like I agree the government lies to us sometimes. That does not justify your main claim. Now, again, in all of this, I am not saying that questioning established narratives is bad. We have to do it.

Skepticism is healthy, but a healthy skepticism is rooted in a request for evidence. There's a world of difference between evidence-based skepticism and just stringing together random events or stretching the truth beyond what it can bear or speculation. These are not the same thing. Skepticism leads to better understanding through a search for actual truth and evidence. And if you're not doing that, then you're just entering an intellectual rabbit hole from which pretty much nobody returns. 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. This is not about left versus right. You see this all across the political spectrum, like all across it. The difference is how we approach all of this. We need to approach all of this with an intellectual rigor. We need to actually be willing to change our minds based on actual evidence.

You have to hold your own side to the same standards. And by the way, this is a great way of telling who exactly is lying to you and who is not. If people keep insisting they don't need to provide you evidence, they're just asking questions, 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 preexisting bias. 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. Are they asking real questions? Is it a real, serious question? Are they presenting real, serious, credible, verifiable evidence? Are they open to real critiques that might actually correct the theory? If the answer to any of those is no, you might want to click somewhere else.

So today I wanted to have on somebody to talk about the JFK assassination who literally wrote the book on the JFK assassination. It's Gerald Posner. 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. 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. But it's fascinating, obviously, to tens of millions of Americans.

I sat down with Gerald Posner today to talk over the various conspiracy theories surrounding the JFK assassination.

Gerald, thank you so much for stopping by. I really appreciate it. Thanks, Ben. Good to be with you. So I'm really glad you're taking the time. 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. What I meant by that is that I actually know who killed JFK and it was Lee Harvey Oswald. And the reason that I don't care about it so much right now doesn't is because like I know the answer. I used to care a lot about the assassination 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. It 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. 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.

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. 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. And yet this stuff continues to persist. The evidence record is overwhelming. The credible evidence on this case in terms of forensics, ballistics, eyewitness testimony, you put it all together and it's a case that you say this is what happened in

It's Lee Harvey Oswald having killed the president. 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. 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. 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 Oswald? There has to be something more. It can't just be the chaos theory of life that things happen like that. So people want to invest it with more. It's fed all the time with false information, narratives that are false,

that there's information that's repeated all the time that's incorrect. So I'm not surprised. And when you say you got in hot water because you said, by the way, I really don't care anymore about what happened in the JFK assassination because I know what happened. People think that you're dismissing the idea of a much larger conspiracy. Why aren't you going after the deep state? Why aren't you looking at what the CIA did? 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? So people take that as a personal offense

to their own judgment about what happened in the case. So let's talk about the evidence in the case and why it is that this thing continues to persist. So as you talk about in your book, you go through a wide variety of the various theories that are put forth

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. I want to go through a couple of them. The one that seems to be hot at the moment is the idea that LBJ was behind it, that that was made hotter by a purported tape that was put out by Alex Jones and then pushed by Glenn Beck as well, that that.

has an associate supposedly of LBJ talking openly to another associate of LBJ about how they had hired somebody to kill the president of the United States. What do you make of that tape and all of this? So first of all, there are about 25 to 28 people that have claimed credit for being the second shooter

at Dealey Plaza. They've actually come forward in the past and said, by the way, I was the Grassy and All Shooter. There are people that put themselves into the history books to try to claim that they've had some role. Carlos Marcelo, the mob boss from Louisiana, later claimed supposedly near the end of his life that he had a role in killing Kennedy. There's almost a braggadocio to be able to say, oh yeah, Kennedy,

I had him off. I was able to do that. So the same thing happens here with this Mack Wallace tape. This is fantastic. Somebody claims, oh, by the way, LBJ told me that we were working together and we were able to kill JFK at the time. This is supposedly a 1971 recording that is not even the person. Mack Wallace isn't even the person on the tape. His own daughter has said that, as a matter of fact. And all that's said is,

By the way, somebody brought me a tape. That's what Glenn Beck says from 1971. It looks like it's from 1971. It seems as though it's a tape from that period. This is a fake tape that's been put together to try to claim that LBJ was involved in the assassination. Does it surprise me? No, not at all. I've seen fake stories come up all the time. I see concocted evidence. I see people make up things to try to put into the case.

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, they would have said, oh, that, by the way, that doesn't have any of the earmarks of real good evidence. They somehow are willing to accept it and then give it the airing that

catches millions of other people's attention. 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. The CIA is, of course, another sort of target of the idea that they were behind the JFK assassination. Is there any evidence to that effect?

No, not at all. 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. Why? Because in 1959, he defected to the Soviet Union in the middle of the Cold War. And guess what? It was in the newspapers. So they opened up a file. They put Oswald into a file. Of course they did, as they did every other defector to the Soviet Union in the heart of the Cold War. And then they kept an eye on him, but not a distant eye. He wasn't very much of interest to them. He came back in the United States. 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. He thought that they had ruined and bastardized Marxism. He hated the United States, so he was looking now for the new place, and that was Cuba. Then he gets rejected.

in Mexico City by the Cuban and the Soviet missions. We know that the CIA had to have listening devices, other surveillance on those two missions at the heart of the Cold War. Did they know that Oswald was unhinged as he was when he went to those embassies? We now know what happened because the Soviets have released their own files. 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 the, from the revolver, the bullets. Did the CIA know that he had had that type of behavior? If so, they should have told the FBI when he came back into the United States 10 days later,

But we know from 9-11, the agencies don't share information very well. 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. So this is what happens time and time again. Is it a cover-up?

of a murder? No. What the CIA was covering up after with the Warren Commission was its own bureaucratic ineptitude. 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 head of state, not Kennedy, but Fidel Castro. And they failed seven times. They didn't even wound him. 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. It just doesn't happen that way, except in Oliver Stone films. So Oliver Stone actually appeared as a witness at a house...

at a house committee this week to talk about the JFK assassination and talk about how there needed to be more material that was released. How much material has been released on the JFK assassination? Why is Oliver Stone 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 in the JFK film was the date on which Kennedy was killed. It's not quite that bad, but it's almost the case. He is a master at 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. Who killed Kennedy? You'd sit around a room and say, who was it? The CIA? No, the mob, the KGB. I think it's Oswald. So Stone was able to get away with that.

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 of the last 80,000 pages out now, and everyone admits no smoking gun in them after all this time. So what does he want? No smoking guns been released. So he calls on the oversight committee yesterday to say, let's have a new investigation.

look at it all. Let's go through the autopsy and the witnesses and everything else. And I'm thinking to myself, oh my goodness, is there a 911 call, an emergency line that I can call Doge? Because this is the type of thing they should put a stop to tomorrow. 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. And again, I

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. This is a new one. It's rare that you get a new sort of conspiracy theory about an event that happened 60 years ago. 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

the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, as a foreign institution and then somehow sanction it, or because JFK wanted to shut down the nuclear reactor in Israel at Dimona, and therefore the Israelis must have done it.

As far as I can see, zero evidence has been induced to this proposition, like literally zero. And yet this has become the hot story. It's now taken as point of fact, actually, by many of the conspiracists online. It's remarkable. Even I could not have suspected that this would be the flavor of the moment, would be Israel did it. I should have realized that eventually the Jews did it always becomes the conspiracy theory of last resort or first resort. Sometimes it's the first resort and then it comes back into flavor again. This time it has. And you're absolutely right.

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. And why? Because there is no evidence, because it's a bogus theory. But that hasn't stopped it from being spread around. 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.

And guess what? What they really should do if they wanted to, but of course they're not gonna spend the time to do this. Israel in 2013 on the 50th anniversary of the assassination released its own classified files on the assassination. And you say, oh my God, what was in there? That must be fantastic. No.

It was the Hebrew, in Hebrew, the actual meetings of Israeli cabinet officials after the assassination. It was fantastic to take a glimpse into what they thought. And guess what? They didn't know what happened. They talked about it. Golda Meir was then foreign minister. She wasn't yet the prime minister. And she says in one point, eight days after the assassination, by the way, I happen to think there are dark forces possibly here. Maybe he was doing it with the Cubans or

because he's a leftist or because he's a communist. They're trying to figure out what happened and why Jack Ruby killed him two days later. They don't know. 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. It's fanned, it's said, it's spoken out there. And I see it time and time again. It makes your blood pressure just get crazy because I've seen a lot of crazy theories, but this one has a different effect.

because it adds on top of already surging anti-Semitism since October 7th, that mixes into a thing where Jews control the world, they must be behind everything, it's the old czarist forgery of protocols of Zion, and this is a new version of it. So, ah, they must also be behind the Kennedy assassination. They're the ones who pulled it off. That's why it's such a perfect crime.

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. As you point out, there's one factor that's missing there, among others. The factor that's missing is having been through these documents...

Every redaction was to a foreign intelligence agency. So I've seen redactions to Romanian intelligence, to West German intelligence, to French intelligence, to UK intelligence. I've seen numbers of the people that we had in different embassies who were operatives for the CIA blacked out. I've seen budgets blacked out. That's all the type of information that's been redacted over the years. And one of the redactions was to Israeli intelligence. The minute the Israeli intelligence was unredacted,

Nobody says, oh, by the way, they unredacted MI6 in Britain. They unredacted French intelligence or West German intelligence. They must have been behind the assassination. They said, oh, look at that. They 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. This is one, it's not just a bogus theory. It's not just something that I can say to you, it's laughable. 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. So let's talk about sort of the dispositive facts that stand behind the fact that it was, in fact, Lee Harvey Oswald. Because there are certain questions that the conspiracists simply can't answer. In fact, most of the questions

are unanswerable because as you say, the documentary and physical evidence record is overwhelming in this particular case. 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 conspiracy. What would you say to those people? - 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.

Without understanding Oswald, you can't get an idea of how the assassination happened. And what the conspiracy theorists do, and you know this so well, is Oswald becomes a cipher. They don't discuss him. 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? So everybody thinks, well, this is

who's this fellow, this 24 year old who was shooting at the president, why would he do it? 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. He didn't just say, oh, by the way, I did commit the assassination. Please send me to death row.

It's Oswald himself. Most people don't realize he was committed to political assassination. And I don't just say that. He had tried to kill somebody in April of that year. 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. He had run for the governorship of Texas. Oswald viewed him as the next Hitler. Okay.

You can argue with Oswald as to whether that was right or not. 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 as the next Hitler, he's a fascist. 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. So you call somebody Hitler long enough, somebody's going to say, I'm going to try to stop him. That's what Oswald did.

thought he was doing with edwin walker 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 he's frustrated by that he's committed to do something and then he decides to go and join the revolution inside of havana he gets rejected and he

and comes back to the United States literally only five weeks before the assassination. But here's the key, Ben, and nobody talks about this. On September 25th and 26th, when Oswald took a bus to get to Mexico City, where he thought he was going to be in Havana, if he'd gotten the visa to go to Havana, he wouldn't have been in Dallas at all on November 22nd. He wouldn't have been there for the assassination.

When he's taking the bus ride, it's an overnight bus ride to Laredo, Texas and then into Mexico City on September 25th, the White House announced for the first time that Kennedy was going to visit Texas. 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. Oswald tries to get to Havana, he gets rejected, he comes back into Dallas.

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. Can't do it by telepathy. It can't be done, you know, by some secret message. There's no cell phones. There's no text messages. Where's the telephone call? Where's the secret agent showing up to tell Oswald, by the way, you have to do something and become part of the plot?

He gets a job at the Texas School Book Depository before the motorcade route is set. How? Through the CIA? Through special operatives? No. Through a friend of his wife's who asks a friend and says he's looking for a job. And she says, oh, as a matter of fact, my brother just got a job at this place, the Texas School Book Depository. They call up and the supervisor says,

Yeah, I've got a couple of openings. I could put him downtown or maybe at this spot outside of Dallas, send him down. They interview him and they put him at the downtown location. And then the Secret Service sets the motorcade route only a few days before Oswald actually sees it in the newspaper. Yeah, we used to publish the newspaper accounts, right, of where the president was. And the president used to take out...

a motorcade that had a convertible. Just a week before Dallas, he was in Tampa for the longest motorcade of his presidency, 25 miles in an open air car. So Kennedy used to go into the crowds all the time as he did that day in Dallas. So there were many opportunities to shoot him.

And you have to ask yourself one question. If you were part of a conspiracy, if you were the CIA, you were the mob, you were somebody else and you said to Oswald, we want you to be the assassin, you're gonna be the assassin that killed the president.

The president is at a dozen different locations where he's standing still. He's on a stage. He's talking, as Trump was in Butler. When the assassin tried to shoot him, Trump's there. He's not riding in a motorcade. 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. So he says, I want to do it with a rifle shot.

I want to be from a distance. All right. So you put him from a distance when JFK is giving a stationary talk and you have Oswald kill him. But instead, the conspirators decide, you know what? 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.

You don't do that if you're the conspirators. You do that if you're the lone assassin who's looking for opportunities, the means and opportunity to be able to do it. 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. Takes it in the next morning in a long paper bag that he tells the person who's driving him in their curtain rods.

And then he brings it to the sixth floor of the depository from where the sniper's nest is set up. He's left alone there by six of his coworkers half an hour beforehand. And when the assassination is over, guess who's the only person who leaves the depository? Lee Harvey Oswald. All the rest of the employees are there. Why does he leave?

He goes back to his rooming house where he collects his pistol that he had 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 was the only eyewitness who actually saw him doing the shooting that day and gave the general description, mid-20s, brown hair, Caucasian. And when the police officer stops him, he empties his...

revolver and pistol into him, shoots him on the spot, and then he's on the run. He escapes, goes into a movie theater where he's arrested. The idea that this person is not the assassin, to me, is so preposterous on his face. If you're willing to look at the credible evidence, here's the more difficult question.

Was he shooting the president for his own work motivations? Or was he doing it as a plot for others? 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. He was that unstable. But,

That's a legitimate question. Why is he up there? Once you tackle Sirhan Sirhan, once you catch any assassin at the scene. John Hinckley, yeah. Well, Hinckley, we know his motivation. He's the only one who was honest with us, who said, I did actually impress Jodie Foster, and guess what? It was right. So that's one of the few cases in which we actually know the motivation. We can say, you know what?

In that case, it was correct. As crazy as it may sound. But in the rest of them, you're always trying to figure out James Earl Ray and others. You're trying to figure out whether they were doing it for themselves or as part of a plot. 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. That's the part in which you now have a conspiracy that does involve two people, five people, kitchen conspiracy. You have a conspiracy that are hundreds of people and somehow

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. The perfect conspiracy. 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. The 007s, the James Bonds of the world, they exist on film. They don't exist in reality. So you spent an enormous amount of time, obviously, looking into the most conspiracized event

event of the 20th century. But one of the things that's happened is that conspiracy theories have become more and more prominent in American life just generally. And we should differentiate here between actual conspiracies and conspiracy theories. Obviously, there are actual conspiracies in which people get together and they actually do things. 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 and

As opposed to just theorizing that there was a motive to do it and motive alone is evidence that who benefits. If somebody benefits, it must have been that person. Or you take a piece of evidence here that has nothing to do with the piece of evidence here and kind of string it through a variety of knots and somehow come up with a theory. Conspiracies are provable. I mean, we have them all the time in court. We actually have an entire RICO Act that is designed to uncover conspiracies and prosecute them.

but conspiracy theories themselves, wilder and wilder conspiracy theories have sort of taken place over time in American life. And you can see it in the polling about the JFK assassination. At the very beginning, a majority of Americans thought that Oswald had not shot the president. It was bare majority. It's like 53%. Then it drops a little bit. And then in the 70s, it starts to climb and climb really rapidly. And now some 80% of Americans think that it wasn't Oswald who was acting alone. So between 70 and 80% of Americans become sort of

the common writ of American public life. And that if you do believe it, it means that you're a credulous dupe. Why do you think that's happening? Well, I think there are a couple of things. 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.

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. Oswald never had his day in court. The evidence was never presented. People didn't get to see it. 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. So, that was the...

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. That immediately conjures up the ideas of Day of the Jackal, a professional assassin. We're accustomed to having somebody from the Archduke up through other periods running up with a pistol, shooting the person and gets tackled at the scene. At least you know who the shooter is. Then you have to figure out whether it's a conspiracy or not.

So here you have the long range shot, the assassin gets away in the immediate aftermath of the assassination and then you're off and running as well. So I get that. In addition, people don't believe in blue ribbon panels anymore. They might have had some doubt about it then, but the idea that you're gonna have the Warren Commission come out a year later and say, oh, by the way, there's nothing here. So I get why those doubts are there. Then it's fed with false information over a period of time. Things are bad. Facts are repeated that are incorrect.

You get the House Select Committee in the late 70s, which is a reinvestigation that was great. 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. By the way, if you listen to it, you don't hear any sounds. They say there's some supersonic impulses here. We think those are bullets.

Four years later, that was totally debunked by the National Academy of Sciences, but everyone remembers the headline, "Likelihood of Conspiracy Versus Not." Then Oliver Stone comes in in '91 with his film. I'm amazed that anybody thinks it's Oswald alone in some ways because of all of that. But what you said before is key. 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. So I've lived through consequential conspiracies from lies about Vietnam over a period of time to Watergate. I saw Iran-Contra play out. I saw what happened that led us into the war in Iraq when we overestimated what was happening on weapons of mass destruction. But...

What have we had since? We've had the Pentagon Papers. We've had the Panama Papers. We've had the Snowden leaks. We've had WikiLeaks. 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. There has to be evidence. You have to say, what's the basis beyond speculation? And there's one other thing. I...

People think that if I say Oswald alone killed Kennedy, I'm also saying there was no conspiracy to kill John Kennedy. No, there could have been a conspiracy to kill John Kennedy. Right now, as we're talking, there could be some group of conspirators sitting out and talking about wanting to kill Donald Trump. Or when Barack Obama was in office or any president, there's probably a group sitting around and saying, I'd like to get that president, whether it's Islamist or whoever, there's a group.

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. You could have had anti-Castro Cubans who thought that Kennedy was a traitor because he had let them down at the Bay of Pigs by not bombing, saying, I think he's treasonous. We should get rid of him. What I'm saying is you need then to tie a piece of evidence into those conspiracies to

to Lee Harvey Oswald. And that's what's missing. There just isn't any. So Oswald essentially beat any of the potential conspirators to Kennedy. They would have pinned a medal on him. They would have celebrated him. But people assume because one group wanted Kennedy dead...

and then another person killed Kennedy, they must be connected. And they get confused between correlation and causation. And they think, ah, the correlation is there. This group wanted him dead. This guy killed him. They must be working together. I always say, just show me the evidence and I'll agree with it, but it's not there. Well, the book is Case Closed. Everybody should go check it out. General Posner, really appreciate your clarity and thanks for coming on the show. Really appreciate your time. Ben, thanks so much.

Alrighty, coming up, Bill Burr continues his spate of silly statements. We'll get to that. Plus, we're going to jump into the mailbag. Remember, you have to be a member in order to have your question answered. So that's just another great reason you should subscribe over at Daily Wire. Plus, if you're not a member, become a member right now. Use code Shapiro. Check out for two months free on all annual plans. Click that link in the description and join us.