Counter-Currents
Paroled from the Paywall
The Conservative Who Called Out Treason
Morris van de Camp
3,089 words 
John A. Stormer (1928 – 2018) was one of the most significant anti-communist thinkers of the twentieth century. His work helped form the conservative movement which reshaped American domestic politics in the mid-1960s. While rightist thinkers such as Christian Identity minister Wesley Swift might have influenced some elected officials, it is certain that Stormer did. His self-published book, None Dare Call it Treason (1964), influenced the 1964 Republican National Convention which nominated Barry Goldwater as the GOP’s candidate for president. Stormer met and directly discussed anti-communist ideas with Ronald Reagan.
Stormer was born and raised an Altoona, Pennsylvania. His family settled the area in the early nineteenth century and they were of mostly Irish Catholic and German stock. Stormer was raised in a conservative home but was educated by very liberal teachers. When the Korean War broke out, Stormer enlisted in the US Air Force.
He was sent to Parks Air Force Base which is near Dublin, California. Due to the Korean Conflict, the USAF lifted all caps to recruitment. Thousands of men joined and were sent to places like Parks AFB and to be trained for deployment. None of the bases had enough pre-existing accommodations so the installations became tent cities. Stormer and the men at Parks AFB served in a similar way to that that of the men in the Spanish-American War, where most of the soldiers (or airmen) who joined due to the fighting read about the war’s battles in newspapers from their stateside postings.
Life on the base required discipline. A tent city holding thousands meant that laundry services and shower facilities were in short supply. Keeping clean would have been a continuous issue. Latrine detail and kitchen patrol (washing dishes) was also a major activity. All of this had to occur while men were training for highly technical jobs which supported a difficult war. Once trained, they’d be off to the various bases, part of a web of airfields and air corridors used by the Air Force.
Barry Goldwater of Arizona was a radical conservative Republican who ran for president in 1964. Goldwater’s campaign was doomed but in brought forward anti-communist conservative ideas into the national conversation. John A. Stomer’s book None Dare Call it Treason was handed out at the 1964 Republican Convention. Wealthy Republicans had purchased thousands of copies of the book for wide and free distribution.
Stormer served in Squadron Section, 3275th Training Wing. There, he worked as an editor and a unit historian. In that capacity, he would have met all sorts of people and would have been required to professionally interact with high-ranking officers, which is an important skill. Stormer’s love for writing and editing started while he was in the Air Force.
The Korean War was also a conflict which altered American politics. Prior to the outbreak of hostilities, President Truman was able to win election in 1948 by keeping Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal coalition together. Meanwhile, the New Dealers – often radical Leftist intellectuals – endorsed less-than-efficient economic and social policies while being sympathetic to communism. Many of these New Dealers were ethnic Jews.
There was resistance to Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal prior to the Korean War, but it was confined to dour, eccentric Yankees such as Merwin K. Hart. As the casualties in Korea mounted and Americans went looking for answers, they discovered that many senior officials in the Roosevelt and Truman administrations were Soviet spies and that the Soviet Union was carrying out a policy of global revolution and expansion, which was opposite of what the liberal New Dealers said. The shock of those revelations, made sharper by the casualties in Korea, turned anti-New Deal men, like Hart, into righteous prophets.
Stormer was radicalized as an anti-communist by the Korean War. The moment of radicalization came during the lead-up to the 1952 election. Stormer was going to vote for Eisenhower because he was a “general.” Another person pointed out that their commanding officer was a general also. By now, Stormer recognized the limitations of the military mind so he switched his support to Senator Robert Taft of Ohio, who was more conservative than any Republican of the time. Stormer was around age 24 when radicalized as an anti-communist conservative.
Other men radicalized by the Korean War were George Lincoln Rockwell and Jack Mohr, who was in Korea and had seen a communist rebellion in southwest South Korea prior to North Korea’s invasion. The Korean War put an end to the Anglo-Saxon internationalist One World schemes promised by liberals such as Wendell Willkie and Elanor Roosevelt. International organizations like the United Nations would continue, but a large slice of the American public would be hostile to such institutions going forward.
Anti-communism created by the conflict also ran along a spectrum. The wisest of the anti-communists recognized that many of the chief Bolsheviks were ethic Jews or non–Russians in the Soviet Union – like Georgians. Commander Rockwell made the Jewish role in communism the center of his activism. Other anti-communists downplayed the Jewish angle and met the semi-theological movement with another theology – such as Christianity, ideas about American liberty, or “free market” economics. Robert Welch, who led the anti-communist John Birch Society didn’t bring up Jewish issues and focused on Americanism and exposing “conspiracies” some of which did not exist. Stormer also kept clear of Jewish issues throughout his career.
While still in the service he married Elizabeth Lewis in 1951. Stormer left the Air Force with a National Defense Service Medal – indicating his military service took place during a time of war. He went on to get a journalism degree at San Jose State – just down the road from Parks AFB. He then went on to edit an electronics magazine.
However, he was dissatisfied with the situation and concerned about communism. He moved to a suburb of Saint Louis and became active in the Missouri Republican Party. Saint Louis is a city whose demographics and geographic position can push Rightist thinkers further to the political Right. Saint Louis is a combination of Northern efficiency alongside the worst of Southern pathology. The city was the first to experience the migration of sub-Saharan blacks from the South so its citizens recognize that “civil rights” promises don’t work. There is generational knowledge there, so to speak. The city is also not ethnically much different than the Midwestern countryside which surrounds it, so there is no sharp us-versus-them conflict with the hinterlands such as the case in New York City or Brussels. The city also experienced the economic problems of the Rust Belt, so trade and tariff failures are immediately understood.
Stormer’s active mind, talent for writing, and awareness of current events caused him to create his own publishing company and then write and print None Dare Call it Treason (1964). The book sold 7 million copies. Wealthy Republicans purchased copies and distributed it by the thousands at GOP meetings. Other organizations did the same. Because the book was published by an independent operator, it didn’t make any bestseller lists. This information bubble is why smug liberals failed to recognize the emergence of the Conservative Movement in the 1960s.
The Kennedy – Johnson Administration
President John F. Kennedy was killed by a self-radicalized Antifa gunman acting alone at the end of 1963. Kennedy’s shocking death turned a president who was only marginally popular while alive into a beloved national martyr. In 1964 it was very difficult for any political writer to go against the fallen Knight of Camelot. Stormer ignored the difficulty by not directly discussing the man that was Kennedy in None Dare Call it Treason. Instead Stormer calls the executive branch the Kennedy – Johnson administration and he focuses on the policies which Kennedy carried out.
No person represented the jumble of contradictions and warring parties within the Democratic Party in the two decades after World War II quite like President Kennedy. He was what Wilmot Robertson called an assimilated minority – Irish – whose family married into prominent Old Stock American families. JFK’s maternal grandfather was a prominent Boston politician. Kennedy was wealthy and attended top tier WASP schools while his publicists spread a narrative that his family were oppressed and excluded.
Kennedy was also a war hero whose father was an America First isolationist who sought to keep the United States out of the Second World War. After getting into politics in the 1950s, Kennedy was fully anti-communist who supported Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin. His policies and ideas were not much different from his Republican rival, Richard Nixon.
The mythos surrounding Kennedy was that he was a wise ruler who could easily pull the levers of power to get what he wanted, but in fact he was in over his head on the domestic front throughout his presidency. The problem was twofold. First, he was inexperienced and didn’t have the same clout in the legislature as his Vice President, Lyndon Baines Johnson. Additionally, Kennedy’s inner circle loathed the Vice President and kept him at arm’s length thereby negating any advantage Johnson might have brought. Second, his base of supporters was divided into two irreconcilable camps.
The first group was the traditional base of the Democratic Party which were white Protestants in the South and Catholics – especially of Irish extraction – in the North. This group leaned conservative and were especially wary of the ever increasing sub-Saharan agitation in the so-called “civil rights” movement. The other part of Kennedy’s base supported “civil rights” to the point of aiding the sub-Saharan agitation in every way. This portion consisted of Northeastern intellectuals, liberals, New Dealers, and anti-anti-communists.
There was also the black vote which could still swing to either party in 1960. Kennedy had won that by expressing timid support for a “civil rights minister” at a key point in the campaign, but Stormer was not a racial activist, instead he focused on fighting communism domestically rather than criticizing Kennedy’s desegregation efforts.
The Cogent Package of Anti-Communist Ideas
None Dare Call it Treason power is derived from Stormer’s incredible writing ability. The words flow into a string of brilliant sentences. The ideas are a cogent summation of the successes of communism after Kennedy became president. Stormer ignores any communist gains in the 1950s, mainly because there were few spectacular Red successes then. Additionally, while Eisenhower and the Republicans continued to carry out New Deal economic policies, they were able to carry them out with Republicans who were free of the reputation for communist sympathies which many Democratic New Dealers had (rightly) acquired.
When Kennedy took office in 1961, he pushed against anti-communists in many ways. Areas which President Eisenhower had made off-limits to Soviet citizens were opened to them by Kennedy. The administration also fired an anti-communist writer, Don Caron from his job as a Forest Service Ranger. Military personnel were forbidden to watch an anti-communist film called Operation Abolition.
The Eisenhower administration took America’s Cold War concerns seriously. The map above shows the areas off-limits to Soviet citizens. The directives which barred Soviets travelers were probably not constitutional and reflected domestic concerns rather than a genuine strategic strategy to win the Cold War. Why would rural parts of Pennsylvania be banned to a Soviet traveler but not Philadelphia? What part of the shore of the Great Lakes held vital secrets? When Kennedy was elected these sorts of measures were eliminated, but Kennedy paid a domestic political price, since conservative anti-communists saw the measures as part of a pattern of liberal appeasement to the USSR.
The Kennedy – Johnson administration also carried out an economic policy of trade with the nations in central and eastern Europe which were communist and Soviet satellites. The plan was not unreasonable given the fact these nations had a simmering hostility towards the Soviets and have an entirely different civilizational ethos.
That Russians had a vastly different mentality from western Europe was not fully understood by Americans at the time. Most chalked the differences to communism alone. The captive nations behind the Iron Curtain also had no real ability to resist the Soviets. Their pro-Soviet governments were completely in control in the 1950s and 1960s. The various uprisings, such as in Hungary in 1956, were crushed. Therefore, it was not unreasonable to recognize that any economic aid to communist nations proposed by the Kennedy – Johnson administration was high risk in the short-term with only vague, long-term benefits. Stormer writes,
American stores were…opened to Russian crab meat, Polish hams, Yugoslavian and Hungarian baskets, Czechoslovakian glassware and Christmas tree ornaments. In the first year communist products worth over $100-million were imported into America. The trade was a two-way proposition Though sales of woven baskets, clothes, pins, and other non-essentials in America, the communists earned the money to buy strategic goods here. As an example, in 1961 officials in the Commerce Department overruled Defense Department protests and issued export permits to allow the Soviet Union to buy machine tools in America for grinding the precision ball-bearings for missile guidance systems. [1]
The Polish ham/Yugoslav basket issue became a rallying cry for right wing radio hosts and it led to a counter-reaction by the Kennedy administration against rightist ministers and radio personalities. Stormer’s concern over this issue benefited from a wave of outrage over Kennedy’s appearance of appeasement towards global communism.
Stormer also pointed out to a problem during the Cold War, the Afro-Asiatic bloc in the United Nations. Other than Congo, the recently decolonized states in the Third World hadn’t become failed states yet, so those nations were able to influence the policies of international organizations. Stormer writes,
…if the “neutralist” Afro-Asian block united, as usual, with the communist countries and voted democratically to place all Americans in slavery. Would it be wrong? Perhaps. But it would be democratic. [2]
This insight was known and understood by rightist Americans who followed the ins and outs of international diplomacy. Stormer’s writings broadcast the situation to a large group of Americans. He was also critical of the liberal theologians. Two were Dr. Walter Rauschenbusch and Dr. Harry F. Ward who Stormer said were,
…probably the most responsible for the “revolution in religion.” They replaced the Bible–based belief that man was individually responsible to God for his own salvation with a concept of “social salvation.” Rauschenbusch was a turn-of-the-century theologian and Ward was a professor of Christian Ethics at New York’s influential Union Theological Seminary for 25 years. Analyzed, the “social salvation” which collectivist theologians teach is basically a restatement of the Marxian dogma of Economic Determinism – “change the economic environment and man will be transformed.” [3]
Stormer didn’t say much about “civil rights” in None Dare Call it Treason. He doesn’t mention sub-Saharan rioting because it didn’t start until after the illicit second constitution, the 1964 Civil Rights Act was passed. He does mention an anti-“civil rights” activist, Ted Walker. He had led some anti-“civil rights” protests and was maligned by the Associated Press and reported on more factually by the United Press. Stormer was among the first of the conservatives to point out in a widely read book the duplicity of the mainstream media. He also pointed out the Walker was unjustly declared insane by the Kennedy – Johnson administration, and this sort of thing was done by the Soviet Union to anti-communist dissidents.
Stormer was not particularly religious in 1964. He was also a two pack a day smoker. One evening he discovered he was out of cigarettes. He realized that it was too late to get any at any store. However, he didn’t pass an uncomfortable night craving smokes. He attributed this to divine intervention and became “born again.” Eventually he’d become a Baptist minister where he continued to write. He also preached on Sundays and set up a school.
His later writings were numerous, and he popularized the fact that the Supreme Court could set precedents and declare something un-constitutional using laws crafted in a communist or other foreign land. He also criticized the problems of public education. His writings also leaned colorblind-conservative and he invoked the faulty theological idea of Judeo–Christianity.
After the Berlin Wall collapsed and the Soviets were on a downward trend, he wrote None Dare Call it Treason: 25 Years Later. In the introduction to the 1992 paperwork version he wrote that many former communists were still in power, although they claimed to not be a communist presently. Of American anti-anti-communists, Stormer wrote,
The leftists of various persuasions who have dominated America’s schools, churches, press, labor unions, State Department, etc. for over 70 years are still in power. They are the “liberals” who have aided, supported and apologized for the Reds in China, Russia, Cuba, etc. while they were murdering at least 100-million people…That these American “liberals” still cling to the dream of a one-world socialist state was made plain in a September 8, 1991 column by William F. Woo. He’s editor of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, a newspaper with a leftist slant much like that of The New York Times, the Washington Post and other major newspapers. Woo, in a lengthy column, reviewed the 45 years of the cold war conflict and said: A certain humility here is advised. Historians 1000 years hence may possibly regard the U.S.S.R. as a failed experiment in communism that awaited a much later flowering – even as we see Periclean Athens as a brief attempt at democracy that served as an inspirational example for the system’s eventual fulfillment centuries later. [4]
Indeed, there was still considerable open sympathy for communism in academia in the early 1990s. I saw what a pro-communist book in a college bookstore in 1993, but these sorts of books vanished over the next few years. Personally, I thought that Marxism was done. I was wrong. It continued to be taught underground and re-emerged during the Summer of Floyd in 2020. Additionally, leaders like Angela Merkel were ex-communists who caused a great deal of trouble during the refugee crisis which started in 2015.
Throughout the rest of the 1990s Stormer continued to support conservative causes. I corresponded to him sometime around 2007, I had a choppy manuscript I thought he might publish. He politely informed me that he was retired. Stormer’s strengths were that he brough ideas to an idea fight. He was also able to secure backing from extremely prominent and wealthy people. It was they who made a self-published book into a bestseller by aiding in its publication and distribution. He also came along when anti-New Deal think tanks and institutions were fully mature. He didn’t take on “civil rights” directly, however.
Notes
[1] Stormer, John A, None Dare Call it Treason, (Florissant, Missouri, Liberty Bell Press, 1964) p. 74
[2] ibid. p. 120
[3] ibid. p. 124
[4] Stormer, John A, None Dare Call it Treason: 25 Years Later, (Florissant, Missouri, Liberty Bell Press, 1992) p. vi
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36 comments
This was one of my parents’ main books. They were members of the John Birch Society and held meetings at our house, which were sometimes attended by a US Congressman. Their magazine was American Opinion. Other books included John Noble, I Found God in Soviet Russia; and titles by Watchman Nee and Witness Lee, Chinese Christian anti-communists. There was a book on the shelf with a bright blue cover entitled Encyclopedia of the Far Left. My parents were racially conscious. I still have a Goldwater pin: a gold elephant wearing black rim glasses. I seem to remember Robert Welch was an important author.
The Dissident’s Creed
In a world of echoes and prescribed beliefs,
Where conformity reigns and dissent brings grief,
There stands a soul, unbowed and unafraid,
Whose inner truth cannot be swayed.
Through knowledge gained and lessons learned,
Through instincts honed and wisdom earned,
This rebel heart, with eyes wide open,
Sees beyond the words oft spoken.
Intuition whispers, soft yet clear,
Cutting through the noise we daily hear.
Experience paints a different view,
Of what is false and what is true.
Mainstream currents may surge and roar,
But this spirit chooses to explore
The depths of self, the heights of thought,
Where authentic living can be sought.
In conscious refusal to blindly agree,
This dissident finds a way to be free.
Combining fragments of insight’s art,
To forge a path, unique and apart.
Though voices clamor, “Fall in line!”
This steadfast will continues to shine.
For in life’s grand, mysterious game,
The greatest rebel dares to remain
True to the whisper in their soul,
Trusting in life to make them whole.
In this dissent, a strength is found,
A deeper truth, profound and sound.
So let the world spin its tangled tale,
The awakened spirit will prevail.
In quiet rebellion, strong and sure,
The light of truth shall endure.
These “ we re not racists “ John Burch , “ none dare call it conspiracy “ , Goldwater , Willis Carto 1960s Conservatives haven t aged very well . Compare this book “ None Call it Conspiracy” to Jean Respaul s “ Camp of the Saints “ which reads terrifying true today .
Eastern Europe , the USSR was a safe all ha Wite place to live n the 1960s , 79s – beautiful , not spoiked White European women , safe subways and great ice hockey teams.
The same could not be said about “ our” fallen cities in the 1970s.
just try to watch one Right Wing American TV cop shows from the late 1960s, early 70s – Dragnet and Adam 12 – uptight , pole up their arses idiots obsessed that sone White college kids smoked MJ .
IMO this was as stupid as 90% ha wite European USA being obsessed in 1960 that John F Kennedy was horrors of horrors a Catholic Christian .
None Dare Call It Treason!
There was a time when a much dog-eared copy of John Stormer’s book could be found on every real American’s coffee table and prominent in the magazine bin. Not to mention boxes full of the paperback on the back shelves of second hand bookstores and the card tables of charity rummage sales.
Then there was former (?) G-man Dan Smoot and his Report, exposing communist infiltration into the United States government. You can still find video of his televised programs around the InterWebs.
And who can forget Dr Fred Schwarz and his Christian Anti-Communism Crusade? Schwarz published a newsletter, wrote books like You Can Trust the Communists (to be Communists), and even got big names like Ronald Reagan to address cheering crowds at sports arenas.
Thing is, in those days there was this mass anti-communist infrastructure with a propaganda apparatus and the ability to mass mobilize activists. But the flaw seems to have been that with the Fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 too much of the apparatus got paid off and went home. The Free World had beaten the Communist Conspiracy once and for all, didn’t it?
Still, amazing that Stormer lived into the second decade of the 21st century. One wonders if he read Counter-Currents?!
Fantastic article as always, MvdC.
I particularly like the clearcut take on the Kennedies, the truth about Saint Jack and who killed him (hint: it was not the Joos). The Kennedies admirably supported Senator Joe McCarthy. And no, I never had anything against St. Jack for being Catholic. It was the least of Biden’s worries as well.
I think it is clear that softballing the JQ and Race might garner lots of respectable money from Conservatives, Christians, and the patriotic wealthy who correctly despise Communism ─ often without really understanding it ─ but “respectable” in this sense (no JQ or Race) is not where the real fight is. George Lincoln Rockwell had it all figured out long ago.
🙂
I am fascinated that there is something like a cult of personality concerning John Kennedy.
Why is it always discussed whether it was a lone gunman or not? I don’t believe the official story, but I am not an American and don’t worry about the Kennedy family that much. And why Americans should? It’s not the central question of life.
It’s also funny how they came to the centre of American politics with Joseph Kennedy. The Roosevelts at least have been there for a long period of time, but this family has jumped to the stage God knows from where.
Kennedy was the first Catholic President to be elected and he had plenty of fans who hadn’t thought this even possible. Kennedy admirers tend to be younger Silent Generation types and older Baby Boomers, so that was a large cohort of youth.
There is definitely a cult-of-personality regarding JFK and to a lesser extent RFK. Both were assassinated and “martyred,” which leaves open lots of unrealistic fantasies about what changes they “could” and “would” have made. RFK broke with the Democratic Party establishment and LBJ, and he favored ending the Vietnam War soonest. After Bobby was assassinated, Nixon got elected in 1968 on a cautious peace-with-honor platform.
Filmmaker (((Oliver Stone))) is an older Baby Boomer born in 1946, and he did a combat tour in Vietnam in the U.S. Army after studying at Yale University. Stone’s 1991 movie JFK basically is premised on the idea that if Kennedy had lived, he would not have plunged into the Vietnam intervention, which his “counter-culture” generation was formed by.
This ignores that the Vietnam intervention was sold as a “flexible response” for the Cold War ─ a cheaper alternative than confronting Soviet or Chinese Communism directly, by supporting “brush wars” in places like Indo-China. Kennedy gave a messianic “Ich bin ein Berliner” speech in Berlin in 1961, but secretly he was relieved that the Soviets had put up the Berlin Wall dividing East and West with a formidable barrier as it would reduce tensions and nuclear brinksmanship.
In 1962, Kennedy and his corporate “Whiz Kids” argued that they had staved off World War III with a graduated response to the Air Force’s (thank Gen. LeMay) discovery that the Soviets were in the process of installing nuclear missiles in Cuba which threatened the U.S. East Coast. And during the Cuban Missile “Crisis” one would think that the U.S. Navy had not been conducting blockades since the time of John Paul Jones ─ but Defense Secretary McNamara’s systems analysts people tended to view experienced military experts as incompetent philistines.
The fact is that the old Democratic Party was hugely on board with the Vietnam escalation that ultimately fell to Kennedy’s successor ─ and in their worldview they were carrying the torch for Global Liberalism that had been benighted by McCarthyism and Gen. MacArthur’s unwelcome vigilance before he was fired after wanting to win the Korean War outright since the United States had been obliged by treaty to defend South Korea in the first place.
Taking the fight to North Vietnam by fighting Communist insurgents in South Vietnam sounded fine in theory. And it would be safer from nuclear brinksmanship, perhaps. Haiphong Harbor was not even blockaded in 1964 and not until late in 1972 by Nixon. And today it is simply forgotten how much Vietnam was the literal “baby” of the Democratic Party and Kennedy himself.
JFK was comparatively young and a fresh face in the Democratic Party. FDR and his Hyde Park Jewish buddy, Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau, Jr. were plutocrats who unironically saw themselves as authentic Jeffersonian Democrats. FDR was very slow to push Civil Rights onto the Solid South, which would endanger the Yankee, Irish, and Southern Democrat coalition. FDR spoke the language of the common man on his Fireside Chats radio addresses, and he advocated that the Federal government could help them during the Depression ─ but FDR was more interested in grabbing Federal power by building new “alphabet agencies” than in either Keynesian spending programs or levying new taxes from the rich to pay for government giveaways.
FDR believed in balancing budgets and was only partially committed to progressive economic programs. He claimed that only the Democrats were addressing the acute unemployment issue, and then after having gotten some wiggle room with a rubber-stamp Congress, FDR started having trouble with the Supreme Court ruling the some of these agencies and programs were Unconstitutional.
World War II leveraged this almost automatically and effectively ended unemployment, which is how FDR was elected to two additional unprecedented terms.
JFK went far beyond Roosevelt and Truman and took on Civil Rights and the Solid South directly ─ and it backfired badly. JFK from Massachusetts as “President Yankee” was highly unsuccessful getting any legislation through Congress. That fell to sucessor LBJ, an old school New Deal Liberal who was more savvy with Congress, and a Texan good-old-boy himself. Lyndon Baines Johnson went hard to get Kennedy’s Civil Rights platform through Congress using the Martydom coattails of his predecessor.
LBJ also went all-in on Vietnam, which is why Baby Boomer Liberals like Oliver Stone think that the Kennedies were saviors cut down by Fate and Hate.
Many simply cannot fathom that the great man, JFK, could have been killed by a nobody like Lee Harvey Oswald who simply brought his cheap twelve-dollar surplus WWII Italian Army rifle to his workplace one day as the Presidential motorcade glided through Dealy Plaza.
Many think that there had to have been some kind of Grand Guignol conspiracy with the CIA and the FBI to have pulled this off when all it took was an open window on the motorcade route that was published days in advance. The ballistics at the event is nothing special.
The farthest Dealey Plaza shot was made at less than 81 meters, and any soldier or Marine who could not reliably make a head shot at that distance in three tries, I frankly would not want to serve with.
By the mid 1970s when there were assassinaton hearings in Congress, a poor television dub of the Zapruder Film was shown to the public for the first time in 1975. Hipster ABC journalist Geraldo Rivera incorrectly claimed that this showed Kennedy’s head being thrust backward violently (as if from a second shooter in front of the motorcade).
The Dallas Police Department actually had the case wound up in a couple of hours because Lee Harvey Oswald left his warehouse job at the Texas School Book Depository Building immediately after the shooting and was later questioned by a Dallas police officer while getting away after a brief visit to his lodgings. Oswald was probably surprised that he had gotten away and now intended to take the bus to Mexico and then make his way to Cuba after having made a trip to Mexico City earlier in the year to apply for asylum at the Cuban and Soviet embassies.
Oswald had already unsuccessfully tried to kill Gen. Edwin Walker, before being handed a golden opportunity with the President’s motorcade coming to town and driving right by the building where he worked.
Oswald later panicked when Officer J.D. Tippit of the Dallas Police Department pulled over to talk to him and Oswald pumped four rounds of .38 Special into the policeman, reloaded and dropped the shell casings near the crime scene. Oswald was arrested a few minutes later while hiding in a neighborhood theater that he tried to sneak into without paying.
Oswald had about thirteen dollars in his pocket and had already spent a dollar in cab fare to go to his boarding home about two miles away from his place of employment at Dealy Plaza in order to change his clothes and too retrieve his revolver.
The multiple gunman theory has no legs whatsoever, although there was some confusion because the Kennedy family did not want an autopsy performed at all ─ let alone in Dallas which had jurisdiction for the murder ─ so the Secret Service forceably took the corpse back to Washington on Air Force One, and they then reluctantly permitted the Navy to do the required autopsy at Bethesda.
Contrary to popular belief, the Bethesda Naval Hospital autopsy was excellent and not botched, but the pathologists were working in the dark a little bit about what had happened in Dallas since they did not have even a prelimary police report that would have been available to the coroner in Dallas (who was top-notch).
Nowadays a Presidential assassination is automatically a crime with Federal jurisdiction, even if it does not actually occur on Federal property.
President Johnson benefitted from the assassination ─ and his swearing in on Air Force One with Jackie still in her bloody pink dress was tacky ─ but this does not mean that he had anything to do with it. LBJ thought it was vitally important to show the Soviets that somebody was ever at the helm.
The FBI basically concurred with the Dallas Police. The main thing Johnson wanted from Director J. Edgar Hoover was assurance that the assassin(s) had not been targetting the Vice President too.
Gov. John Connally was collateral damage because he was sitting in front of the President (downrange) on a jump seat of a different height and placement, and all shots do line up perfectly with the 6th Floor of the TSBD, although the Warren Commission left out some details and better diagrams.
The second bullet hit Kennedy in the back side of the neck to the right of his spine, and exited near his throat, and then keyholed into Connally’s back, emerging from his chest and then grazing the Governor on the right wrist and then became lodged inside Connally’s left pant leg, bruising his thigh. These kinds of military full-metal-jacketed bullets are designed to penetrate, so nothing special happened here except that Kennedy might have survived this wound, as Connally amazingly did.
Nobody was hit from the front ─ and this can be seen in high-resolution versions of the Zapruder Film if you actually look frame-by-frame. Abraham Zapruder’s 8mm color home movie film was decent but had no sound, so that makes it difficult to analyze the ballistics somewhat. But the 2nd shot was probably fired when the motorcade was behind the Stemmons Freeway sign from Zapruder’s perspective.
Oswald probably had some indecision since he waited almost too long before firing his first shot. Ironically the first round that he did fire was the hardest as there was quite a bit of L-R deflection as the limousine went by the window on a hairpin turn.
James Tague, who due to the Dealy Plaza traffic jam was accidentally downrange near the triple underpass and was hit on the cheek by a gravel fragment probably from Oswald’s first missed shot, but it barely drew blood.
The tree underneath Oswald’s six-floor window was also partially in the way for the 2nd shot that wounded both Kennedy and Connally.
The last try was more of a straight shot, and less than 100 meters away, which is where most high-powered rifles are sighted in at.
Negro TSBD workers having their lunch on the 5th floor directly below Oswald‘s 6th floor window and watching the motorcade themselves, could hear Oswald’s empty shell casings hit the floor above them when Oswald cycled the rifle. Oswald had blocked off the elevator so that nobody would be inclined to take the stairs up to the 6th floor, where he stacked some boxes around his sniper’s perch.
Oswald quickly stashed the Carcano rifle after wiping off most of the fingerprints; he bought a Coke in the lunchroom vending machine, and was then seen leaving the TSBD shortly after the shooting by fellow TSBD worker Buell Wesley Frasier, who had given LHO the ride to work earlier that day. Frasier thought that Oswald was just going for lunch as it was that time and he knew that Oswald hadn’t brought one that day. But Oswald never returned when the police and the warehouse company did a head count not very long after the shooting.
The police gave a generic description of the suspect (Oswald) to other patrol units and broadcast this on news radio. That is why Officer Tippit and the Hudson’s Shoes store manager near the Texas Theater were suspicious when they saw Oswald and how he was acting.
Per the Zapruder Film, at no time does Kennedy’s head lurch backwards ─ but in spite of wearing a heavy back brace, the President slumps immediately upon the third and fatal shot, and the bullet which almost missed him on the top-right of his head, broke open a skull plate on the right side of his head which is left hanging by a flap of skin.
There is no doubt that the bullet came from the rear, and you can see from the frames of the Zapruder Film the blood spatter and high-velocity debris going forward as the fatal bullet hits the President from the rear: Zap. frame 312 ; Zap. frame 313.
Some observers at Parkland hospital in Dallas incorrectly thought that Kennedy had a big hole in the back of his head, not just a smaller entrance wound. And some observers incorrectly thought that the exit hole on Kennedy’s throat was the entrance hole because the doctors at Parkland hospital had opened up his trachea with a scalpel. The doctors were trying to resuscitate and did not look at the hole in the back of his head near his crown, nor the one on the back of his neck just to the side of his spine. However, the pathologists at Bethesda figured out the bullet injuries just fine.
Not all of the gory details let alone photos were released to the press per the wishes of the Kennedy family, so you get a lot of inaccurate diagrams and so forth that wind up in conspiracy-theory publishing and so forth.
One persistent trope is that the 2nd bullet did some kind of “Magic” flight path to hit both Kennedy and Connally. It didn’t, but the Warren Commission was not unwilling to seriously consider the lesser thesis that Connally and Kennedy were hit by separate bullets and that the first shot had therefore not missed.
The majority of the Commission agreed with young legal staffer (((Arlen Specter))) that the first round had missed, however. The Magic Bullet was not “pristine,” either; lots of bullets don’t mushroom the way that Hollywood might depict. Contrary to Oliver Stone and Kevin Costner, Arlen Spector’s so-called Magic Bullet theory was not in any way the foundation of the Warren Commission’s conclusion that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone.
The Dallas PD and the FBI had earlier made the same correct conclusion.
🙂
Now, that’s a detailed answer! 🙂 Thank you very much, Scott.
So, the Kennedy family is riding on charisma and martyrdom of John and unique demographic/cultural circumstances of his election? (I think that the emergence of TV broadcasting also contributed to the cult.) Or is there something more in it?
And generally, I don’t know how to judge them. Joseph Kennedy looks like a decent person to me. But John and Robert were responsible for Little Rock, Hart-Celler Act and other crap, although it started before their ascendance to the official positions. Nevertheless, it seems that JFK was opposed to the Swamp (at least on some matters). Some facts, like inviting Charles Lindbergh to the White House, suggest that he was not happy with his political surroundings. Trump’s RFK is admirable for his stance against Big Pharma, but he has deficiencies in some other areas. They are all too ambiguous. Generally, if someone is a bastard, he is a bastard consistently. Do you think that there is some positive output from them, or is it more like a show? Would it be better if JFK was not killed, or not elected at all?
Concerning his murder – I understand your rigour, but have another point of view. I’m for generic analysis first, and it’s very suspicious when a president of a huge country gets killed by a loner. Yes, your argument is very convincing, but we can’t know all the details. Maybe, with the available facts, it looks like 90% probability of a “lone gunman” and 10% for “conspiracy”.
Nevertheless, my recommended approach is “suspect conspiracy by default”. Not only in politics, but also in computer security and other areas. You, Americans, are too naive, even if you understand a lot more than the average citizen. We live in a different environment and have acquired an immunity. Don’t wait until an American comrade makes you immune, it can be done in advance! 🙂
It’s not to argue against your point, just a friendly advice. 😉
I don’t think that assassins make the world a better place, however much I dislike Kennedy and most of the things that he stood for. And I don’t like the “kill Baby Hitler in his crib” argument even if I did dislike the elder Adolf.
Old Joe Kennedy to his credit had supported Senator Joe McCarthy, and Bobby had even been an assistant counsel ─ probably less subversive than (((Roy Cohn))).
I do like JFK’s commitment to turn the arms race into the space program, and there are many other things to like. I think that Nixon was a better choice in 1960 ─ not saying that much ─ and that had Kennedy not been shot and canonized, then he very well might have lost reelection in 1964, probably to someone more rounded than Barry Goldwater, the Senator from Arizona who was a Libertarian with an extreme fiscal conservative mindset and a penchant for creeping social liberalism, though not as bad as JFK or LBJ.
Kennedy was struggling in 1963 and he was in Dallas to start his 1964 reelection going from tough crowd to more appreciative venues. Nixon had just been in town and the motorcade wasn’t thought through very well; the overworked local police and Secret Service should have made sure that building windows on the parade route were closed. Oswald took advantage of a weird and unlikely opportunity and, unlike “Fascist” Gen. Ted Walker, Oswald had nothing against JFK himself.
Oswald could not even look him in the eye when the motorcade approached the TSBD down Houston St., and he almost missed his big chance to make history as the car whipped onto Elm St. just before entering the freeway to speed off to his speaking engagement at the Dallas Citizens Council’s annual meeting at the Trade Mart.
If Kennedy had gotten his legislative way with Congress, we would despise him as much as LBJ and for the same reasons. Sure, there is a chance that he might not have sent draftees to Vietnam, but who knows for sure? He and Sec. McNamara were the ones who set the machinery in motion and were dug into this path long before that November in Dallas.
Yes, I agree that it is significant that the Kennedy assassination was one of the first events in live broadcast television. It made many careers like CBS anchorman Dan Rather, who was from Dallas. As a former broadcasting engineer myself, it is interesting how these events came about, such as when (((Jacob Rubenstein))) shot Oswald two days later in the parking garage of the Dallas court house.
Jack Ruby was walking by to Wire some money to an out-of-town employee that Sunday morning, and with his trusty .38 Colt snubbie revolver in his pocket, as Ruby was walking back to his car past the North side of the court house, a crowd of reporters had gathered at the basement parking garage at the Court House because Oswald was to be moved to the county jail. So Ruby just waltzed in to see what was going on as the lone police officer guarding the entrance ramp was distracted. Ruby wanted to be a big shot and was good at crashing parties.
When Ruby saw Oswald’s smirk as he was escorted out, he lost his head, drew his weapon and fired point blank. Jack Ruby was another loser ─ just a sleazy busybody in the right place at the right time. Nothing more esoteric than that.
With respect to conspiracy-theory, I respectfully disagree that this should be the default mode. I think a Skeptical default mode is useful because it encourages us to look further. We actually know less than we think we do and it is quite possible to be wrong.
But conspiracy-theory easily devolves into what I call “epistemological nihilism,” and that easily becomes flat-earth theory, “fake nukes,” no germ-theory of diseases ─ and a whole host of other nonsense that we know via the scientific method and from trusted educators, but have not necessarily seen with our own eyes. I’ve noticed that many of these types of people take the Bible as the literal truth without much reflection, however.
Maybe the esteemed philosophers on this board have a better technical term than “epistemological nihilism.” I wouldn’t know because I found most philosophy in college to be pointless other than Boolean algebra and some political stuff like Hobbes or Machiavelli. Metaphysics is definitely not my forte.
John Hinckley, Jr. is the nutter who in early 1981 wanted to impress the skanky underaged actress from the bizarre 1976 Scorsese movie Taxi Driver, Jodie Foster, and he just happened to be in the right place at the right time on a Washington, DC curb to start shooting at President Reagan with a .22 caliber revolver as the man was climbing into his limousine ─ thus wounding the President and severely wounding others.
We don’t consider this to be a conspiracy-theory, however, mainly because the would-be assassin did not succeed in killing the new President. If he had, I might have thought at the time that it was something engineered by Vice President George Herbert Walker Bush, who was a member of the Bilderberg Group and not Reagan’s first pick as his running mate.
But thinking that something “makes sense” does not actually make it the truth. A more parsimonious explanation, and therefore more-probably correct, is that Hinckley was just a disturbed man who was in the right place at the right time, and that Mr. Reagan (like Trump) got lucky and survived the gunshot.
It is hard to say how it would have otherwise affected the world that we know now. Presidents Reagan and Kennedy and Trump were not “nobodies” like the people who fired at them.
🙂
-“Per the Zapruder Film, at no time does Kennedy’s head lurch backwards”. The Zapruder film shows his head move back & slightly to his left when the bullet hits his front right part of his head.
-There is no doubt that the bullet came from the rear,”. The bullet to the head came from the front & slightly angled, which is why his head moved back & slightly to his left.
No, look at a high-resolution copy of the Zapruder Film frame-by-frame or very slow with digital image stabilization.
I first did this in 1991 after the Oliver Stone film came out. I dubbed an excellent copy from a TV station satellite feed onto a 1 inch Ampex reel-to-reel videotape, which then allowed me to freeze each frame with an analog time-base-corrector. This equipment was production quality, much better than broadcast quality, or Super VHS.
The Geraldo dub of the Zapruder Film is simply crap. The actual Zapruder Film does not show what many people think it does.
However, today there are better digitized and stabilized copies of it available, from YouTube and Bitchute or elsewhere that you can look at easily in HD, and slowed down as slow as possible or viewed especially frame-by-frame (LINK).
Zap. frame 312 ; Zap frame 313
As blood and brain matter is violently propelled forward from the shot coming from the rear, Kennedy’s head does not move more than an inch or two back and forth with the shot impact.
However, he does rapidly collapse like a rag doll after the final shot and then falls backwards. Remember that there is going to be some spring to this as he was wearing a heavy elastic back brace, which is probably why he had not already fallen over when first wounded. In addition, the car was coming to a near stop with Kennedy slumping forward, and then rapidly starts accelerating again.
Also, it is important to note how the physics of ballistics works. The bullet is not going to deliver more force to its target than the recoil at the gun itself. People expect a lot more to happen when you shoot something because of how Hollywood portrays gunshots. I believe the common filmmaking special effects technique for making the person getting shot “fly backwards” was developed for the movie The Wild Bunch (1969) directed by Sam Peckinpah. But that is just not how real gunshots work. They almost never actually knock you over.
🙂
Scott,
“Kennedy’s head does not move more than an inch or two back and forth with the shot impact.”
Yes it does, his head moves back…. We all can see it. The official narrative on JFK assassination is a lie. Then we have Lee Harvey Oswald murdered – how convenient !
Scott:
“Kennedy’s head does not move more than an inch or two back and forth with the shot impact.”
John:
“Yes it does, his head moves back…. We all can see it.”
No! There is an optical illusion especially with the 1975 ABC TV copy that Geraldo shows.
Zapruder’s 8mm Bell & Howell handheld motion picture camera only operates at a jerky 18.3 frames per second on average. That is not fast enough even to record the motion clearly.
Studio 35mm motion picture film “flickers” at 24 frames per second other than for special effects.
Analog TV in the United States (the NTSC standard definition used from 1953-2009) was 30 frames per second comprised of two interlaced fields synced to the 60 Hertz power grid. They did it that way so that Sportsball games would not be jerky on broadcast television.
High definition and digital uses even faster frame rates to capture real-world motion.
Geraldo showed an optical illusion based on a bad video dub from a bad 8mm copy of the original medium that was highly limited to begin with. That does not a conspiracy make.
Again, look at it frame-by-frame if you can or in very slow motion with image stabilization.
The victim’s head barely moves but the body does collapse quickly after the head shot, and with the limosine starting to accelerate. In frame 312 the fatal bullet has already made contact, and in frame 313 it is long gone along with the sainted man’s brains, bone chips, and bullet fragments.
If the bullet had come from the front, you would see blood spatter to the rear. (The arrows shown are mine but they are not to scale.)
John:
“The official narrative on JFK assassination is a lie.”
Most people have not even read the Warren Commission Report. Have you? Yes or No.
I don’t like Justice Earl Warren, but LBJ trusted him.
John:
“Then we have Lee Harvey Oswald murdered – how convenient !”
Yeah, because Oswald’s face was plastered on national TV and the helpful Dallas police (not having any modern media savvy) informed the Press in advance that they were going to move LHO that day, before Noon on Sunday, so the media were already in the parking garage with their live TV and film crews.
Jack Ruby noticed some activity when he walked past the Dallas Municipal Court House on Main Street to go to the nearby Western Union office at the corner of Main and Pearl.
And walking the block back to his car a few minutes later, Ruby snuck into the Municipal Court House basement North ramp (off Main) while the lone guard was distracted with the armored police car backing in that was to transport Oswald to the jail at the County Courthouse at Houston and Commerce Streets.
Notice at 0:21 of this video complilation that Ruby is almost struck by the right-rear bumper of police car backing down the North ramp just after he fires and is being tackled (LINK). Ruby had not been there for long but wore a suit jacket and hat so looked like any other reporter waiting.
Dan Rather would have gotten the scoop of the Ruby-Oswald shooting live for CBS along with NBC, but he was a few minutes late with the Dallas microwave feed since CBS had been covering Jack’s memorial service in Washington, DC which went long ─ and then they went to Harry Reasoner in New York reading an “engrossing essay” that they did not want to cut away from just to see Oswald being loaded into a police car (LINK).
Then somebody stepped up and shot Oswald! Some in these live news reports were even getting Oswald’s name wrong. Lee “Howard” Oswald, LOL.
I learned in Historiography 202 that real History does not always unfold the way we think that it was “supposed” to. This is usually called the Teleological fallacy.
“Coincidences” only seem that way in retrospect. Like me bumping into Senator Bob Dole at the airport, or Nancy Reagan in the hallway at my old High School before an event with the former California Governor.
Both Presidents Obama and Clinton have spoken right outside of my 4th floor office window less than 100 meters away, and I wasn’t searched by the Secret Service or police. Pardon me Sirs, can you wait here for me to fetch my Carcano?
🙂
The shocking lack of security at the Dallas Police HQ is displayed by the fact that the famous British disc jockey John Peel (living in Dallas at the time) and a friend were able to waltz in pretending to be journalists.
They had no i.d., pens, paper or cameras. It was when Oswald was first shown to the press and Ruby was also there. If you search ‘John Peel in Dallas’ on youtube you can hear him talk about it. He’s also seen in the footage mingling with the press.
Yes, I have sometimes covered live events as a broadcasting engineer with the microwave feeds and whatnot ─ and minimum-wage event security not sure about our “press passes.” I guess lugging the vectorscope, RF cables, and box of tools is something that you usually see from gate crashers at sportsball games.
The Dallas Police definitely made a big mistake leaking the time for Oswald’s Sunday morning jail transfer to the Press, and underestimating the threat ─ given that his face was already being plastered on TV since the Presidential assassination two days earlier.
Not having the man who shot the Man for an actual trial was a huge Fail ─ and probably why the entire subject is still doubted by the public.
This was a Brave New World of live television broadcast media being invented on the fly. We have the benefit of hindsight that they did not.
It was not like CBS’s Edward R. Murrow pretending to cover the Blitz live on the radio in 1940 London ─ or seeing the Hindenburg explode in flames and be tearfully described on live radio whilst in the process of mooring at New Jersey in 1937. Oh, the humanity!
🙂
And what about Trump’s RFK? I have heard good opinions about him from people I trust, and he looks more decent than a lot of other (former) Democrats.
By “suspecting conspiracy by default” I mean that. I use “statistical” approach, if you will. Let’s assume that we have a 99% probability of a plot when a high-ranking government official or politician gets killed, and 1% we leave for an accident/loner et cetera. Then, out of 100 random murders, we likely get about 99 entangled with some plot. Nevertheless, there is about 63% probability of at least one of these events to be actually accidents. The probability distribution may be 90%/10%, or 70%/30%, or something different, but it is clear that it is skewed towards “conspiracy”. It’s a great problem, and if I have enough time, I shall do some research and publish a scientific paper. So, we have a huge number of events to investigate, and, frankly, if the number is 100, or 1000, or 10000, I’m not going to check it all thoroughly. But statistically approaching it and assigning probabilities according to the previously known distributions is good. Here it is coupled with generic assumption that there is something hidden from us in politics, which is sound, reasonable, provable and actually works well. Look at what Eastern Germany was supposed to be and turned out to be in reality, for example.
And another consideration for Americans specifically – you have a “naivety bias”, so to speak, even if you are more conscious than others. People believed something like Walter Durranty reports because they expected to be treated fairly, and it’s not a coincidence. I think you just don’t notice it, like the air you breathe. You need to consciously compensate for that. I don’t want good Americans to learn it the hard way.
Concerning Kennedy – he is not even №1000 priority for me, and I’m not going to investigate that much. It happened 10000 miles from my home more than 60 years ago in a different country. You have dived deeper, but I suppose you also were not there when it happened. So, it’s a convincing theory, but it’s all based on seventh-hand accounts. I mean that there’s a lot of people now judging everything, whose only experience of the events they judge consists of news’ stories, TV coverage and social(ist) networks. I have seen that it doesn’t lead to more truthful results, with or without conspiracies involved. Oswald may have acted alone, or have been weaponised by some unknown CIA agent, or have been used by communist alien lizards from Vega. The circumstances look suspicious, so I suspect. I suspect, therefore, I exist. 🙂 For such a distant event, you almost never can be so sure.
And it’s not “epistemological nihilism” at all. It’s that the world is infinitely more complex than we can comprehend. You must be an electronics engineer by education, or something like that – it’s largely engineering hubris. 😉 Science was not meant to be a cargo cult. I understand the positivist approach, but it’s just false. Positivism has ended already in 1938, when Kurt Gödel proved his great Theorem. The “trusted institutions” or sciences also largely don’t deserve to be trusted. The only really pure science is mathematics, because it operates in the realm of its own. Even there, a lot of things are uncertain. You can read something on the “Continuum Hypothesis”, for example. Or consider the Choice Axiom: it may seem very obvious that “it is possible to choose any point x from a given set M“, but there are serious objections to it. E.g. you can choose a point from R, and it can be 7, or sqrt(2) (unfortunately, TeX/MD control commands are unavailable here), or π, but a continuum of numbers just cannot be described by any sequence of words or digits – you can try to prove it yourself, it’s not too difficult. So, you have a lot of numbers which cannot be written in a sequence of digits or words, and here enters the great Danish mathematician Karl Brauer with his intuitionist mathematics, which, for example, lacks the double negation rule of standard mathematical logic. And don’t get me started on Euclidean/non-Euclidean geometry. 🙂
Considering other sciences – imagine Maxwell travelling to us now and learning about quantum mechanics, relativist physics, the Standard Model, nuclear/thermonuclear reactions, black holes, lasers/masers, theories of non-stationary space and other wonderful things. He would grab a Gauss gun and go on a shooting rampage in Cambridge! It’s really mind-blowing when you consider that in quantum mechanics an object doesn’t have a spacial trajectory at all, only a wave function. So, a lot has happened there.
Another thing with “trusting the Science” is that a lot of people have very poor understanding of it. I mean not only idiots whom we have seen plenty of during these five years, but, regrettably, the scientists themselves. For example, I was shocked by discovery that my physicist friends don’t understand their own mathematical apparatus enough, like they don’t know that δ(f) has a function from L2(D) as an argument, not a number. And they are really very good – PhDs in condensed-state physics, nonlinear optics! You can extrapolate this to other sciences and scientists and get a damning result.
Overall – much of what may be considered “trusted science” is actually false, not only “social sciences” (99% or maybe more), but also biology, medicine, even geology and physics. And also the level of a lot of scientific publications plummeted during the recent decades. Even journals which were reputable previously, like IEEE TAC, have become full of errors. They are not trustworthy at all.
With regards to the “flat Earth theory” – it’s amusing, but they can eventually turn out to be right. No, not in the sense you think. There is a theory that three-dimensional space is a tricky projection of a two-dimensional one. It is based on the fact that a black hole’s entropy is dependent on its surface area, not volume. Although I prefer 3 spacial, one temporal and 23 hidden dimensions. 🙂 Or consider Moon Landing Hoax theory. I don’t believe it, because, for example, American filmmakers are too stupid to film it realistically and not mess anything with accelerations, velocities, delays etc. But I understand when people are sceptical about the landings, and it’s actually a good thing that they doubt the official narrative.
You may initially get the feeling that there’s no floor and no ceiling, but eventually it leads to better understanding of the world. And I’m not against engineering mindset, being myself both a mathematician and aerospace engineer. It just needs to be confined to its area. Outside world is more complex than that.
Anyway, I appreciate your efforts. It’s good that someone has explored the Kennedy case so thoroughly. At least, I can concentrate on other things. 🙂 I just think that the efforts could be better applied elsewhere…
That is probably true.
I think it is useful to debate such stuff as an intellectual exercise, and I am interested in the Kennedy assassinations and the Space Program. I don’t have the patience to deal with flat-eartherism and some of the other conspiracies.
I’m not quite old enough to remember the events in Dallas in 1963 other than adults talking about it ─ but I saw the endless TV coverage and memorialization of the RFK, Sr. assassination in June of 1968 because it was all that there was on TV. And I fondly remember all of the Moon Landings from 1969-72. I visited Mission Control in Houston, Texas not long after Skylab and Apollo-Soyuz in the mid-1970s.
What a lot of people don’t realise is that Science is a “revisionist” or contingent (though pragmatic) paradigm and not a canon of immutable or even “settled” truth.
Mathematics is more precise because it works according to the rules that we have previously determined, and we just plug in the variables and the operators. Abstract mathematics might be different, but that’s way over my head.
The human brain probably didn’t evolve to handle things like imaginary numbers anyway ─ and yet we employ this kind of vector algebra in practical radio electronics and antennas every day. Other than Amateur Radio from time to time, I don’t do any “engineering” any more. I sometimes have to slay IT department dragons, however.
🙂
Actually, people who believe in QAnon etc. can be directed towards good more likely than those who believe everything MSM tells them. MSM-lovers are frequently impenetrable at all. 🙂
AR is great! I’m glad to know that there are Americans with brains and arms attached at proper places, who can design a circuit and solder it.
And I fondly remember all of the Moon Landings from 1969-72. I visited Mission Control in Houston, Texas not long after Skylab and Apollo-Soyuz in the mid-1970s.
I’m a little jealous! I have been to our Korolyov Flight Control Centre, and we have our own MC at the company. But visiting Houston MC when NASA meant business must have been good and romantic also! I didn’t think it was possible to get there, if you were not an insider. That looks like White Privilege. 🙂
Watching Saturn-V lift-off live must be awesome, too, even on TV.
Most of us have tried to take that “1st Step” to “do something” about the racial, cultural civilization collapsing of our country etc. This “1st Step” is almost always something “Conservative” , “Judea Christian”, “Constitutionalist”, “Anti Communist, anti Socialist” that doesn’t’ mention race or …
The Jeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeews.
It never goes anywhere, but it’s a necessary 1st step to somewhere.
I highly recommend everyone here read, re-read, stupid the Great George Lincoln Rockwell’s “White Power” and especially his chapter “50 years of failure”, “It’s now over 100 years of failure, documenting how Conservatism in all it’s forms has failed us here in the USA/North America.
https://www.colchestercollection.com/titles/chunk/W/white-power/chapter12.html
This blog “None Dare Call It Conspiracy”, “The John Burch Society” etc – it’s all about that 50 years, now 100 years of failure.
JR
I truly wonder what Mr. Stormer would think about the CCP in 2020s. Threat, or best trading partner we ever had? Am I the only one suffering from cognitive dissonance on China policy?
IMO this is THE most depressing blog, article ever on any remotely ha Wite identitarian, race realist, patriotic immigration reform, JQ aware, Black rapist and rioter aware web site, magazine (Amren, Installation Magazine etc) ever.
Worst of all it’s 100% true.
These head up their arses 1960s “Conservatives” back in their days when the United States of America, Canada were > 90% White European American wasted all that time on ridiculous, pointless obsessions, Christian church denominations, opposing all forms of “Socialism” like
Social Security for our poor old people
White union organization so White meat packers in Green Bay Wisconsin, Steel Workers in Pittsburgh Pennsylvania, coal miners in Kentucky and West Virginia could earn a living wage and support large ha Wite families with a state at home mom.
IMO racially conscious, JQ aware White Europeans took back near total political and cultural control of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe as early as 1960! That’s why the loathsome J Trotsky Communists or just J Liberals in New York City supposedly had this great St Paul/Rabbi Saul (another horrible Je*) epiphany and converted almost overnight to the Commentary Je* Neo Conservative cult, anti Russian Refuseniks.
And the head in the sand, Paul up their arses Barry Goldwater (half Je*) “The Conscious of a Conservative”, “WFB *$&# Willian F***** Buckley – “God and Man at Yale”, “Up from Liberalism” , “None Dare Call it Conspiracy”, “race denying”, “the Negroes are only a problem because of Communism and liberalism blah blah blah and these dumb head in the sand Old Believer Conservatives wasted the 1960s, 70s and even most of the Reagan Bush 1980s fighting our racially conscious White Russian kinsmen in places like Afghanistan, believing all the Je* Hollywood anti White propaganda against the Russian Soviets same as they believed all the anti German Je* propaganda in World War I *”THE HUNS WERE CUTTING OFF THE HANDS OF BELGIAN BABIES” ah no)., Rambo III, Red Dawn (the White Racist Russian/Soviet paratroopers invade Eastern Montana. Just look at #*$&# map!
I’ve tried to hang out with these “we can’t take the 1960s with The Beach Boys Rock and Roll, MJ smoking” yeah Reagan’s idiot Secretary of the Interior James Watts said and did that! Nancy Reagan set him straight, she said she and Ronnie Reagan liked The Beach Boys Music).
I’ve learned from years and years of painful personal experience that there is no way to try to use REASON with these 1960s “None Dare Call it Conspiracy” head up their arse Old Believers. Don’t try to get them to read some honest race realist books like “Camp of the Saints”, “The Dispossessed Majority” or Grand Dad AH’s MK.
Nope only physical pain, Black violent crime, migrant plagues or Je* taking their pretty daughters might, MIGHT have some effect.
In the case of Ron and Rand Paul – Constitutionalist, Libertarian free market, hard money Old Believers even Antifa, BLM mob violence attacking Rand Paul and his pretty blond wife didn’t get R&R Paul to give up this race denying Constitutionalist, Free Market Libertarian Old Believer cult she&.
Rand Paul told TV interviewers that the Antifa, BLM mobs that attacked him and his wife were just mistaken idiots, because he Rand Paul was ON THEIR SIDE and had sponsored the “Justice for Breonna Taylor” (Black Heroin gangster mama) killed a police raid, shoot out.
We wrote about this at OD.
https://occidentaldissent.com/2025/01/20/sen-rand-paul-coming-to-his-senses/
Oh God.
This CC blog was depressing – similar to the many, many hours I sat in boring, LDS “Don’t call us Mormon anymore that was RACIST” Church.
JR
OD
TPC radio Show
Eastern Europe , the USSR was a safe all ha Wite place to live n the 1960s , 79s – beautiful , not spoiked [sic] White European women , safe subways and great ice hockey teams.
Great place to meet those women standing in the bread line for 5 hours, too!
“Stormer also kept clear of Jewish issues throughout his career…Stormer was not a racial activist…”
—
Those two lines jumped out at me about Mr. Stormer. I didn’t make it all the way through Morris’s bio of him, but clicked on the hyperlink George Lincoln Rockwell to enjoy Andrew Hamilton’s C-C piece from 2013 of GLR’s 1964 book, This Time the World. Rockwell was a racial activist of the top rank, and did not steer clear of Jewish issues at all.
I was most pleased to see Dr. Johnson’s comment under Hamilton’s article:
—
Greg Johnson: February 13, 2013 … From my point of view, the Jews of today are our principal enemy…
—
The portrait of demi-Jew Barrry Goldwater reminded me that my uncle, Roy Elson (mother’s brother-in-law), just 34 at the time, ran to fill BG’s senate seat in ’64 when he vacated it to run for president. Roy was defeated by three-term GOP AZ Governor Paul Fannin, and again by Fannin in ’68. That ended his political ambitions but he went on to a successful career as a big-time Washington lobbyist. Years later I noticed Paul Lindley’s They Dare to Speak Out, that I had read by then, in Roy’s personal library, and quizzed him about it. He knew about the JQ, but like most political operatives, did not “speak out” about the powerful Jew lobby as courageous Congressman Findley had.
I would have been a high school sophomore in 1964 and just barely conscious about Jews until reading GLR’s Playboy interview two years later.
In 1943 and 1944, when the tide had already turned on the Eastern Front, Harry Hopkins ensured that the “lend lease” giveaway to the USSR was ramped up, while Americans had sparse dinner plates and rationing, massive quantities of all foodstuffs were shipped to the Soviet Union, Soviet fisherman were allowed to harvest crabs off the coast of Washington and Oregon, an air base in Great Falls, Montana became for all intents and purposes owned by the Soviets as tanks and trucks were requisitioned from private companies along with their patents — even uranium used in the atomic bomb was shipped out and, in one gratuitous shipment, made for unknown purposes, a million dollars’ worth of female apparel was sent via Alaska to our “gallant Soviet comrades-in-arms.”
Indeed so. Lots more here:
https://counter-currents.com/2020/03/treason-uncloaked-jordan-stokes-from-major-jordans-diaries/
Excellent. Plus, Eisenhower ordered the assassination of George Patton. Wait until the masses wrap their minds around that one, it will make Alger Hiss look like a picnic.
Douglas Mercer: February 25, 2025 Scott McMeekin’s book Stalin’s War (2021) is eye-opening and stomach-churning. It reveals in fine detail and straightforward prose that everything you heard about the communist subversion of America is not only absolutely true but is even much worse than you’ve been led to believe. Every true American should read it, to find out about the origins of today’s Red America…
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Thanks, Douglas. Wolf Stoner recommended Stalin’s War to me recently. That shows he doesn’t mind sharing the negative truths about his country. Another book I picked up in a used bookstore years ago that tells the dirty truth in detail about Roosevelt’ Lend-Lease Act of March 1941, that had the U.S supplying Soviet Russia with so much military equipment that was used to defeat Germany: East minus West = zero;: Russia’s debt to the Western World, by Werner Warner.in 1961. It’s rare, but another valuable source. Amazon has seven used copies from $100 9 $500.
Scott McMeekin’s book Stalin’s War (2021) is eye-opening and stomach-churning. It reveals in fine detail and straightforward prose that everything you heard about the communist subversion of America is not only absolutely true but is even much worse than you’ve been led to believe. Every true American should read it, to find out about the origins of today’s Red America.
Though rope was desperately needed in the Pacific Theater for American needs in 1942, Roosevelt gave the order to divert 4,000 tons of raw manila hemp to the Soviets — Roosevelt knew this would be so deeply controversial that he put paid Soviet agent Harry Hopkins in charge of it, with orders to lie to Congress about it and deceive the American people. The most shameless requisition by the Soviets was for three million yards of silver braid, costing fifty million dollars (a half per cent. gold content on a sterling silver base). It seems that when the USSR was formed, they took all fancy insignia off of military uniforms — but now that it was the “Great Patriotic War,” Stalin was re-introducing epaulets.
Starting in June 1941 the American government began to give the USSR hundreds of billions dollars worth of war materials. They also allowed Soviet agents to inspect production sites in America, from Riverside, California to Gary, Indiana, thus revealing top secret processes. Anyone who objected to this was demoted or cashiered by the government. Corporations like Westinghouse were ordered to make products for Moscow. At one point the charade was dispensed with, and to save time Soviet agents were simply issued US Army requisition forms which they could fill out and give to the government — and the requests were granted. Roosevelt asked nothing from the Soviet Union in return for this colossal largesse, so in the end Lenin was wrong: The capitalists didn’t sell the communists the rope with which they might hang them — they just gave it to them as a gift.
When the war ended, the fate of Poland, Czechoslovakia, the Baltic States, Hungary, and virtually all of eastern Europe was foreordained. Roosevelt had already ceded them to the USSR.
The fact is, we had the Soviet Union over a barrel and could have driven any bargain we wanted to with them. We could have punished them and driven them back behind any borders we desired; could have de-fanged them. Instead we armed them, gave them the very blueprints of our industrial might, gave them the bomb, and created an “enemy” that tied us up for half a century.
The only two entities that benefited from World War 2 were the Soviet Union and the Jews. Revilo Olvier called the war the Crusade To Save The Soviet. The Jews too.
None of this is any coincidence.
You are exactly right, we should have listened to Patton but it was all part of the jews plan
Oleg: February 26, 2025 And what about Trump’s RFK? I have heard good opinions about him from people I trust, and he looks more decent than a lot of other (former) Democrats.
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Oleg, you might want to inform your trusted friends who think well of Bobby Jr, from here by John Massaro. the foremost expert on the Jewish history of vaccines and the dangers they pose: Just Another Kennedy | National Vanguard
So here we are once again with the latest, and perhaps the last, progressive Kennedy, the son of a murderer, who thinks he’s going to make the country, and the world, a better place. Like George Bush Jr. and Donald Trump, he got to where he is only because of Daddy’s money. Actually Grandpa’s money, which was showered on Daddy and his siblings. It’s common knowledge that Joseph Kennedy Sr., the patriarch of this messed-up family, became enormously wealthy by making shrewd investments and business deals, and bought his three surviving sons their political careers. Actually, Joe Sr. had a few things going for him, one of which is that he was Jew-wise and not afraid to talk about it, which led to his resignation as U.S. ambassador to Great Britain shortly after the outbreak of World War Two. His attitude towards the Jews apparently trickled down to John, but certainly not to Bobby and Ted.
Robert Kennedy Jr. is a seriously flawed individual. As a teenager he was expelled from two boarding schools for drug use and arrested for possession of marijuana. Years later he became a heroin addict and was arrested again for possession of that substance. (His younger brother David died of a drug overdose). He’s for same-sex marriage and LGBTQ privileges. He’s good friends with trashy Jewish comedian Larry David and pushy Holohoax survivor Vera Sharav. He’s now on his third marriage and was an unfaithful, skirt-chasing bum, which seems to be a genetic trait with the men of this family. On September 8, 2013, the New York Post published a juicy article titled “RFK’s sex diary: His secret journal of affairs.” The newspaper purportedly obtained a copy of his 2001 diary which detailed his liaisons with 37 women, sixteen of whom he had sex with (he kept a “scorecard”), while he was married to his second wife Mary Richardson, who committed suicide in 2012. The article documents some rather kinky behavior and attitudes on his part. The diary is actually quite introspective, with Bobby confessing to feelings of guilt about his “lust demons.” When questioned by a Post reporter about it, he denied that he kept a diary that year. You can read the article online and draw your own conclusions. One fact alone, that he’s been a longtime friend and supporter of Hillary Clinton, has praised her character, campaigned for her and actually called her “great,” should tell you all you need to know about this guy. If not, consider his assessment of October 7 as “an ignominious, unprovoked, and barbaric attack on Israel” which “must be met with world condemnation and unequivocal support for the Jewish state’s right to self-defense. We must provide Israel with whatever it needs to defend itself — now.”
RFK gets very worked up over big businessmen who don’t believe in global warming, and has expressed a wish to imprison them. However, I think he takes more after his Uncle John than his father and Uncle Ted — that is, he’s not a total zero but does deserve a little credit. If, as is claimed, he was instrumental in cleaning up the Hudson River, and waterways throughout the western hemisphere, by filing numerous lawsuits against major industrial polluters, then I tip my hat to him. But these days he’s better known for speaking out against the depravity of the big pharmaceutical companies and federal “public health” agencies, especially in regard to dangerous vaccines that have been harming our children. Last year I read his book The Real Anthony Fauci, which goes far beyond the crimes of that infamous slimeball. The Kennedy name alone instantly lights up the landscape, and his authorship of a timely book with a provocative title guaranteed huge sales despite a media blackout. It quickly sold more than a million copies, while so many obscure authors struggle to sell a few thousand or even just a few hundred copies of their works. Having said that, I will add that The Real Anthony Fauci is a valuable read, especially for those unfamiliar with the putrid corruption of the medical-industrial complex, even though I do have some criticisms, namely the fact that RFK takes the Covid scamdemic seriously, and scatters his idiotic liberal ideas and biases throughout. Nevertheless, he fearlessly exposes the vile scum who are responsible for so much misery and death in the world, and in doing so has painted a target on his back. Perhaps there was a connection between his outspokenness on this topic and the arrest, on September 15, of an armed man impersonating a federal marshal who got near him at an appearance in Los Angeles.
But I don’t want to be too generous in my praise. The Jewish media, masters of deceit and confusion, have long been spinning RFK as an anti-vaxxer, but he’s anything but. Since the Kennedy name is catnip to so many, including well-meaning people who have been exposing the vaccine fraud, RFK’s input, both as a public speaker and a literary contributor, is frequently sought. He wrote the foreword to Vaccine Whistleblower: Exposing Autism Research Fraud at the CDC, published in 2015. Most of this book is a transcript of four secretly but legally recorded phone conversations with a conscience-stricken senior scientist at the CDC named William Thompson. These are RFK’s opening lines: “I have always been fiercely pro-vaccine. I had all six of my children vaccinated. I believe that vaccines have saved millions of lives and that broad vaccine coverage is desirable. To achieve those goals we need safe vaccines, transparent and reliable science, and an independent regulatory agency.” Some anti-vaxxer. The rest of the foreword, however, is hard-hitting and rational.
Nevertheless, it gets worse. I credit Brian Shilhavy, who runs the generally excellent (minus the biblical verses) website healthimpactnews.com, with exposing more unpleasant facts about this man. In a January 3, 2023 article that questioned the motives of some of the big shots who were blasting the Covid vaccine, there’s a brief video clip of RFK not only doubling down on being a fierce supporter of vaccines, but adding this gem: “We should have policies that encourage full vaccination for all Americans.” Furthermore, the article links to his 2021 tax return, which shows that he earned a salary of $497,013 as chairman and chief legal counsel of his 501-c non-profit organization Children’s Health Defense, sweetening his net worth of roughly $60 million. On childrenshealthdefense.org, he puts forth an insipid six-step plan to get the vaccine train back on the right track. He is a true believer in vaccines, as long as the manufacturers get the toxic ingredients out, but has never addressed the fact that no safe vaccine has ever been invented. Considering the tyrannical streak in his father and uncles, and his quotations above, if he had the power I wouldn’t put it past him to mandate that all Americans be injected with a whole slew of “safe” vaccines…
Read more about Bobby Jr. at the link
Thank you, Will! That cleared the whole picture a lot.
Nevertheless, RFK looks better suiting his current job than most of his party mates. I hope he does something positive at HHS.
Unfortunately, I can’t access National Vanguard from Russia. My ISP also blocks VPNs and TOR access, even obfs4 bridges. Curiously, National Alliance is not blocked.
Oleg: March 1, 2025 Thank you, Will! That cleared the whole picture a lot. Nevertheless, RFK looks better suiting his current job than most of his party mates. I hope he does something positive at HHS.
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Maybe he will to some extent, driven by the Trump team. It’s too bad Americans have not been exposed to Bobby, Jr.’s sordid history. His Democrat party mates are insane and are guaranteeing that they will not reverse the GOP’s 2024 wins in Congress in the 2026 mid-term elections.
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Unfortunately, I can’t access National Vanguard from Russia. My ISP also blocks VPNs and TOR access, even obfs4 bridges. Curiously, National Alliance is not blocked.
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Russian NA member Wolf Stoner is blocked from NV also, but not from WhiteBiocentrism.com. I see that some of his posts on WB are reposted on NV.
What does the Kremlin fear by blocking Russians access to NV? For that matter what does the USPS fear by rejecting U.S. citizens sending mail to people in Russia? I’ve taken to sending our monthly NA Members BULLETIN to Wolf electronically ever since the USPS began rejecting snail mail to him. For every measure there is usually a countermeasure.
Ethnic Russian people are not enemies of White Americans — despite what Jew-controlled media tell us — any more than Germans were our enemies 80 years ago.
Oleg,
Can you possibly put …” you have a lot of numbers which cannot be written in a sequence of digits or words” in layman’s terms? Also, what is the significance (if any) of this problem in the world of applied science, engineering, or technology.
Mr. Van de Camp,
Your characterization of Oswald as an “antifa” is a real eye-opener! It took me completely by surprise, but, of all the things he has been accused of being, this could be the right one. Would it be then that Oswald saw Kennedy’s anti-communism as somehow fascistic?
Scott,
You say “Oswald had nothing against JFK himself”; do you have an idea why, then, Oswald killed him?
Oleg,
About your remark … “the world is infinitely more complex than we can comprehend.” This is precisely the argument many believers use against atheists to defend faith in God. Many Christians hold this complexity simply could not have evolved via natural selection. These people are sometimes labelled “creationists”, a reference to their belief that God created the world/universe/all things visible and invisible. Any thoughts on this?
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