Bang up job, folks...

[Cliff Varnell]

4 hours ago, Benjamin Cole said:

Well, of course I do not have ironclad answers.

But if you read Wikipedia on almost any JFKA topic....

Wikipedia: 

Conspiracy theorists often argue that there were multiple shooters—a "triangulation of crossfire"—and that the fatal shot was fired from the grassy knoll and struck Kennedy in the front of the head.^[282] Individuals present in Dealey Plaza have been the subject of much speculation, including the three tramps, the umbrella man, and the purported Badge Man.^{[283][284][285]} Conspiracy theorists argue that the autopsy and official investigations were flawed or, at worst, complicit,^[286] and that witnesses to the Kennedy assassination met mysterious and suspicious deaths.^[287]

Conspiracy theories have been espoused by notable figures, such as L. Fletcher Prouty, Chief of Special Operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff under Kennedy, who believed that elements of the U.S. military and intelligence communities had conspired to assassinate the president.^[288] Governor Connally also rejected the single-bullet theory,^[289][290] and President Johnson reportedly expressed doubt regarding the Warren Commission's conclusions prior to his death.^[291] According to Robert F. Kennedy Jr., his father believed that the Warren Report was a "shoddy piece of craftsmanship" and that John F. Kennedy had been killed by a conspiracy, possibly involving Cuban exiles and the CIA.^[292] Communist rulers like Castro and Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev believed that Kennedy had been killed by right-wing Americans.^[293] Former CIA director R. James Woolsey has argued that Oswald killed Kennedy as part of a Soviet conspiracy.^[294]  

</q>

Hardly a virulent attack.

4 hours ago, Benjamin Cole said:

So...back in the 1960s, the CIA had 3,000 people in PR-propaganda. Who knows how many now, and how many are posting stories furiously on Daily Beast, Rolling Stone, Huffington Post and so. 

In 2013 the Associated Press and Gallup both ran JFKA polls.

Gallup found a 61/30% split in favor of conspiracy.

https://news.gallup.com/poll/1813/Most-Americans-Believe-Oswald-Conspired-Others-Kill-JFK.aspx

The AP found a 59/24% split pro-conspiracy with 16% unsure.  

http://surveys.associatedpress.com/data/GfK/AP-GfK April 2013 Topline Posted FINAL_JFK.pdf

The AP poll also asked:

How much of what you know about the Kennedy assassination has come from each of the following sources. (Nearly all/most)

Movies or fictional TV shows — 9%

Newspapers, magazines, television news or websites operated by news organizations — 35%

History textbooks or other non- fiction books — 37%

Discussion with friends or family — 12%

Blogs or websites that are not operated by news organizations — 6%

4 hours ago, Benjamin Cole said:

Sheesh, for a budget of $2 million (peanuts, as you know) the Deep State can flood social and alt-l  and alt-r media with whatever they want. I am sure they spend more than that. 

Maybe they flooded JFKA newsgroups and forums with “CTs” whose job was to uphold at least one Lone Nut talking point — that the back shot transited, for instance?

  

[W. Niederhut]

7 hours ago, Kirk Gallaway said:

W. I also mentioned Udo Ulfkotte's work as 21st century documentation of the fact that GHWB and the CIA never really abolished CIA psy ops (Mockingbird) in the M$M. 

That's false! That was not his work at all! Ulfkotte "work"was as a German with  Neo Nazi leanings who argued in his written columns for the "de islamization" of Germany and also a strong rearming of Germany. He was approached and directed to some  written sources for more ideas by people he found out later  were German intelligence, and exposed it. His primary beef was with German intelligence, and extrapolated that the CIA was doing it too, but again  cited no concrete examples. Find  me one he cited.

Come on W. he's not even a domestic source!

I was going to say focus on Cliff's question. But I see you're starting to.

Yes there has been a greater array of articles disparaging conspiracy theories because there's a great proliferation of bullsh-t and an entire political party spreading them.! And then using these conspiracy theories , trying to overturn elections and threatening public officials. And I've seen you mention in other threads about what a danger these people are, and  I agree! And I don't know why you're downplaying it here. I  see here Cassidy Hutchinson has to move around her residences because she's in fear of her life! We have a bunch of nut cases going to Dallas to see JFK. And I'm not even scratching the surface!

 

 

Kirk,

     You've always been strangely ignorant about PNAC and the science research debunking the Bush/Cheney/Zelikow 9/11 narrative.   It's definitive.  The World Trade Center was demolished by explosives on 9/11.  It's the best kept secret in 21st century America.

     9/11 was PNAC's "New Pearl Harbor event" -- staged to mobilize popular support for the multi-trillion dollar Cheney/Rumsfeld/Wolfowitz "War on Terror" in the Middle East.  (See General Wesley Clark's quote below about what Pentagon staffers told him in September of 2001-- shortly after 9/11.)

     Now we can add to that your ignorance about Udo Ulfkotte's career as a war correspondent in Iraq, and his detailed expose of CIA propaganda ops in Europe in the 21st century.

     Congratulations.  War is peace.  Slavery is freedom.  Muslims blew up the World Trade Center.

[Cliff Varnell]

1 hour ago, W. Niederhut said:

Kirk,

     You've always been strangely ignorant about PNAC and the science research debunking the Bush/Cheney/Zelikow 9/11 narrative.   It's definitive.  The World Trade Center was demolished by explosives on 9/11.  It's the best kept secret in 21st century America.

     9/11 was PNAC's "New Pearl Harbor event" -- staged to mobilize popular support for the multi-trillion dollar Cheney/Rumsfeld/Wolfowitz "War on Terror" in the Middle East.  (See General Wesley Clark's quote below about what Pentagon staffers told him in September of 2001-- shortly after 9/11.)

     Now we can add to that your ignorance about Udo Ulfkotte's career as a war correspondent in Iraq, and his detailed expose of CIA propaganda ops in Europe in the 21st century.

     Congratulations.  War is peace.  Slavery is freedom.  Muslims blew up the World Trade Center.

I’m with you on 9/11 but I can’t buy the hypothesis that the anti-Inside-Job bias in trad media spills over into people’s view of the JFKA.  According to the AP poll cited above, only 35% get a significant amount of their JFKA info from trad media.  

[Kirk Gallaway]

2 hours ago, W. Niederhut said:

You've always been strangely ignorant about PNAC and the science research debunking the Bush/Cheney/Zelikow 9/11 narrative.   It's definitive.  The World Trade Center was demolished by explosives on 9/11.  It's the best kept secret in 21st century America.

Thanks for the compliment! We'll leave 911 out of it for now. But I actually addressed this in greater detail  to Ben in his "Is there a Deep State" thread.

Kirk to Ben: You're not making critical distinctions here. When you assert that GW's War in Iraq was a deep state or "globalist" war, you're really letting Bush off the hook for a very historically grave decision.  This wasn't at all like the Vietnam War. There was no institutional pressure by the government to start that war, nor was there any political  or popular pressure for Bush to invade Iraq, as there was in Afghanistan. This was a completely elective war by Bush and his PNAC bedfellows and the public got duped into it.

****

Now about Ulfkotte.

.Ulfkotte was one of the organisers of an anti-Islam demonstration in Brussels on 11 September 2007, which was banned by the city's mayor.

.Ulfkotte is  a former member of Stop Islamisation of Europe and founder of Bürgerbewegung Pax Europa.^[1]

 

I'm sure this will be blamed on " establishment media", but here goes.

 

.According to Der Spiegal, Ulfkotte has suggested online 'that Muslims could be deliberately contaminating European food products with their excrement and has claimed that 'the intelligence services have been warning us for years about fecal matter jihad'.^[16]

 

Hmmm,  What can I say, my good dude. I'm surprised the irony is lost on you that your star witness in proving that "Operation mockingbird" is alive and well is a German Neo Nazi who wants to rearm Germany and stop it's "islamization'". But to a lesser extent, we've come up to this before.

 

I'm sure he's said some things I would agree with or couldn't dispute.  But you can't so anxious to prove a point that you don't consider your star witness's background.

 

Though you do seem to be backing off in your last few posts, in  that you're using "CIA" less and less MSM  more and more, which is progress, and was my central point.

 

And how about this? We will leave Stone out of this  for now, but I will address Stone if asked.

 

W. I mentioned some personal observations about several highly-educated people telling me that they consider Oliver Stone to be a "flake," (based, presumably, on articles that they have read in "high end" news sources like NYT.)

 

But what strikes me as curious in your statement.  Don't these highly educated people think you're 10 times greater a "flake" than Stone for being a 911 truther? Or is that a secret?

I accept your right to think whatever you think.

You're saying that  just strikes me as really funny. 

 

W. You seem very rankled to call me ignorant, but I don't play any favorites, and  I'm doing this with love.

 

[W. Niederhut]

2 hours ago, Cliff Varnell said:

I’m with you on 9/11 but I can’t buy the hypothesis that the anti-Inside-Job bias in trad media spills over into people’s view of the JFKA.  According to the AP poll cited above, only 35% get a significant amount of their JFKA info from trad media.  

Cliff,

      It's just a hypothesis, but I have seen a lot of misguided, derogatory articles about "conspiracy theorists" in the U.S. mainstream media since 9/11.  Those incessant M$M generalizations about "conspiracy theorists" are misguided precisely because conspiracy theories are not monolithic.  Some are accurate.  Others are kooky. 

    And, as Daniel Ganser has pointed out, "All theories about 9/11 are conspiracy theories."

    As for the JFKA research, it's difficult to believe that that all of the misleading propaganda tropes denigrating "conspiracy theories" since 2001 haven't had a negative impact on the JFKA truth movement.

     

Edited September 25, 2023 by W. Niederhut

[James DiEugenio]

One of the most recent strophes to marginalize the good and honest JFK research based on the new files of the ARRB is to equate any kind of that work with QAnon.

Steve GIllon, one of the worst of the new spokesmen for their side has tried to do this of late.  This is how I replied to him.

https://www.kennedysandking.com/john-f-kennedy-articles/steven-gillon-mark-lane-equals-donald-trump

So the strategy is twofold, minimize any exposure, and then compare and equate the critics with QAnon and/or the people who attacked the Capitol during the Insurrection. When, in fact, there is no comparison at all between those groups--none, nada, zero.  Gillon is using the classic propaganda technique of false equivalence in order to do one simple thing: avoid the facts.

I for one, think that the work of the ARRB was quite valuable.  We discovered a lot of new things that the CIA and FBI were trying to conceal.  Facts about Oswald, about Kennedy, about the forensic angles of the case. To  take one example, the work of the HSCA's Betsy Wolf on the CIA file, that was of significant importance in any study of Oswald. It was clearly supposed to be hidden forever. Malcolm Blunt discovered it and we have it at K and K and I talked about it in Canada. And it will be in the new book I contributed to, The Chokeholds coming out in November. In my view that should have been in the media.

As Tunheim said to Oliver, the Board  must have issued about a hundred press releases. Yet the ARRB got very little notice at all. I mean how many people even know who Tunheim was or what the Board was  up to?  And yet that Board was made up of purely Establishment people. But the MSM did not like what they were doing.  So with very few exceptions, the important things they did discover were all but ignored.  The one major exception I can think of was the late George Lardner's story on the Gunn/Horne medical inquiry. 

 

Edited September 25, 2023 by James DiEugenio

[Cliff Varnell]

1 hour ago, W. Niederhut said:

Cliff,

      It's just a hypothesis, but I have seen a lot of misguided, derogatory articles about "conspiracy theorists" in the U.S. mainstream media since 9/11.  Those incessant M$M generalizations about "conspiracy theorists" are misguided precisely because conspiracy theories are not monolithic.  Some are accurate.  Others are kooky. 

    And, as Daniel Ganser has pointed out, "All theories about 9/11 are conspiracy theories."

    As for the JFKA research, it's difficult to believe that that all of the misleading propaganda tropes denigrating "conspiracy theories" since 2001 haven't had a negative impact on the JFKA truth movement.

     

As I mentioned in an earlier post, on three occasions during the 90’s I opened up the sports pages of the SF Chronicle to read that Oswald acted alone.  Then I could go to the funny pages and read in Doonesbury that JFK conspiracy theorists were whackos.

Since none of that sort of drive-by smearing made an impact on public opinion, it’s hard for me to see anti-9/11-inside-job coverage impacting views of the JFKA to the extent of a 20% increase in LN support.

[Cliff Varnell]

On the night of the autopsy, with the body in front of them, the autopsists seriously considered the possibility JFK was hit with a high tech round.

This fact has been ignored by the US Gov’t, the Mainstream Media...and the JFKA Masterclass Critics.

That’s my second beef with y’all.  The first is the collective failure to reach consensus on the root facts — T3 back wound, throat entrance wound.  This plays into the hands of the Cover-Up, creating a sense of false mystery surrounding cut and dried facts (e.g. The bullet holes in the clothes are too low to associate with the throat wound).

E. Martin Schotz wrote a scathing critique of COPA in 1998 — still applicable, in my book.

https://www.ratical.org/ratville//JFK/FalseMystery/COPA1998EMSapp.html

[James DiEugenio]

And let me also add this.

Where was Tunheim in the media when Biden just went ahead and radically altered the JFK Act?

Should he not have been in the news?

He is the sole remaining member of that Board.  The rest have passed on.

If you can show me where he was and on what TV show he was featured I would like to see it.  Since I missed it.

[Sandy Larsen]

11 hours ago, Cliff Varnell said:

12 hours ago, James DiEugenio said:

The number of people who .... thought it was a conspiracy went through the ceiling in the years  1991-92 due to the film JFK.

11 hours ago, Cliff Varnell said:

 Not according to the Gallup poll.  The support for the conspiracy view was steady from 1976 to 2001.

 

Sorry Cliff, Jim is right on this. The percentage who believe it was a conspiracy popped up by 15 points when JFK came out. That's a significant rise.

 

 

[Cliff Varnell]

1 hour ago, Sandy Larsen said:

 

Sorry Cliff, Jim is right on this. The percentage who believe it was a conspiracy popped up by 15 points when JFK came out. That's a significant rise.

 

 

Gallup:

One man	Others involved	No opinion
2001 Mar 26-28		13	81	6
1993 Nov 15-16		15	75	10
1992 Feb ^		10	77	13
1983 Oct ^		11	74	15
1976 Dec †		11	81

 

The JFK spike in the other polls matched highs reached twice earlier.

Edited September 25, 2023 by Cliff Varnell

[Pat Speer]

FWIW, I studied the media's response to the 50th anniversary and rated the programs and articles as to CT bias and LN bias. I found that there was a 2-to-1 bias to the LN position--roughly double what one would expect based on public opinion polls. 

Over the years, however, I have noticed a divide. For every documentary, newspaper article, or news program saying Oswald did it there is a movie or TV drama which alludes to the JFK assassination--and presents is as a conspiracy. Movies like Shooter, or Watchmen, in which characters claim to have participated in or are shown to participate in the assassination, may very well have as much impact on public opinion as Bugliosi's book, or Stone's movie. 

Edited September 25, 2023 by Pat Speer

[James DiEugenio]

Sandy, thanks.

The Gallup Poll is not the only one out there, not by a long shot.

At the time of JFK, then  in 1993, and as late as the 50th, there were many other polls out there. And many of those were in extreme for our side.

One of the great disappointments on the JFK case has been cable TV and the liberal blogs.

The so called experts on the former have been usually Shenon, Sabato and incredibly Posner. 

Try and find a good story about the JFK case at Huffpost or Josh Marshall, or Politico.

In about 1994 according to that fine book, The CIA in Hollywood, they were complaining about how they did not reach out to Oliver Stone before his film JFK.  And this is when they decided to place their own man out in the film biz.  But they also said that  through the office of public affairs, their attachments to media reps has gotten even stronger and they have turned some damaging stories into successes. 

I do not think there is any doubt that one later would include Gary Webb.

[Steven Kossor]

Aldous Huxley and Neil Postman have more to contribute to understanding the reasons for the growing nonchalance of younger people toward history in general and the JFKA in particular -- it's just not interesting (exciting, entertaining, amusing) enough to hold on to a modern mind's attention span. Add to that the cynicism about whether or not it is *possible* to know the truth about anything - Gingrich's concept of having a "different view" of the truth/facts -- and you have a growing portion of the population that is not just unwilling to, but is actually becoming incapable of, seeing past rhetoric and analyzing data to find facts. We're not getting better, folks.

[Sandy Larsen]

3 hours ago, Cliff Varnell said:

Gallup:

One man	Others involved	No opinion
2001 Mar 26-28		13	81	6
1993 Nov 15-16		15	75	10
1992 Feb ^		10	77	13
1983 Oct ^		11	74	15
1976 Dec †		11	81

 

In other words, you cherry-picked the poll that supports your position.

What I used is the average of multiple polls. It is known in the field of statistics that averages of polls give more accurate results. (Because of the "law of large numbers.")