Fourth Reich Archaeology

The time has come to say farewell to our ragtag team of commissioners and to close out our ongoing miniseries, The Warren Commission Decided. We wrap things up much as we started them, with Commissioner Gerald R. Ford as our guide. In this episode, with Jerry in the driver's seat, we navigate through the commissioners' executive sessions in roughly chronological order from December 1963 all the way up to when the commissioners presented their report to President Johnson in September 1964. The executive sessions were formal meetings, on the record, in which the commissioners discussed the case, made major decisions, and roadmapped their investigation. It is also where the Commission's chief counsel, J. Lee Rankin, broke the news that Lee Harvey Oswald was an undercover FBI agent.We use the executive sessions as our final dig site because these sessions really showcase what the Warren Commission was all about – covering up any whiff of conspiracy. The executive sessions also show how little these guys cared about getting to the truth. Goal one was to package up a narrative they could sell to the public. As for our boy Jerry, this episode goes even deeper on his almost supernatural ability to rise to the occasion and serve the powers that be.  It’s also another great lesson of how all is not what it seems when it comes to Gerald Ford.This one is going to be another two-parter, with Side A available now for free and the full package dropping exclusively on our P@treon imminently. And with that, let's get digging. . . 

It is somewhat bittersweet to say it, but we’ve come to the end of the line with old Jack Ruby, and in this two-part episode, we will close out his saga in style with returning guest and Ruby expert Max Arvo. Side A comes in hot with a deep discussion of CIA mind control experiments, psychopathic psychiatrists, and Jack’s vivid visions of an American Holocaust, leaving his Warren Commission testimony and final denouement for Side B.We pick up where we left off after Jack’s conviction and death sentence. He fires Melvin Belli and hires the lawyer/psychiatrist Hubert Winston Smith to take his case on appeal. He tries to fire the mountain of a man, Joe Tonahill, too, but Joe refuses to go and sticks around. The first order of business after Jack is put on death row (besides filing his appellate papers) is to put him under hypnosis. And who better to do that than the CIA’s favorite super-shrink, Mr. MKULTRA himself, Dr. Louis Jolyon “Jolly” West. Coincidentally or not, Jolly just so happens to show up right after Jack suffers an acute psychotic break, including vivid audio-visual hallucinations. Thereafter, everything Jack says - including (and especially) all of Jack’s talk of a larger conspiracy - is taken with a heaping portion of salt and largely discarded by everyone around him. This is important because, as we’ve previewed heavily in past episodes, Jack’s Warren Commission testimony raises a lot of eyebrows, as we will cover in depth in Side B among other salient and lesser-known aspects of the end of Ruby’s life. If you want to full 3+ hours in one piece, head on over to Patreon and sign up to get early access! 

Here it is folks! The end of the line for our series within a series within a series, You Don’t Know Jack (Ruby). Finally, we reach Jack’s tragic end. Just months after his conviction was overturned in October 1966, Jack was beset with a sudden and rapidly spreading form of cancer that would kill him by January 1967 before he got the new trial he had won. Meanwhile, his strong intimations of a conspiracy were muddled amidst his psychotic ramblings about a honky-tonk Kirstallnacht rampaging through the streets of Dallas. One thing Jack got absolutely right, though, was that the country he grew up in and served in uniform had been taken over by Nazis. He’d never get the chance to speak his truth except as a novelty, and we hope that we’ve done him some justice, warts and all. 

This week, we are back with the fifth installment in our miniseries about that amateur dog breeder and professional weirdo turned assassin–Jack Ruby. Having set the table in episodes one through four about the events leading up to Ruby’s big day in court, the time has now come for the trial of the century. And you know we’ve got to don our noided lawyer hats for this one. As always, we take a more expositional approach rather than a bare recitation of the facts and chronology of Ruby’s trial. We do so by doing what we do best—studying the people involved. Because we ended episode four with a focus on Ruby’s defense team, we pick things up in this episode by taking a good, long look at both the district attorney who prosecuted Ruby and the judge who presided over the trial. We also take a look at the witnesses each side decided to put up–a colorful cast of characters that included cops, strippers, and Ruby’s rabbi. With cameras flashing, mics hot, and all of America watching, the Jack Ruby trial was set to be a spectacle for the ages. In the end, the trial was a shit show. And in this episode, we go deep into that shit to bring us all one step closer to knowing Jack.

We are back with side B of episode 4 of our excavation into the man who killed Lee Oswald, Jack Ruby. With us again is Max Arvo, and in this one we take a close look at Max's original research on the subject of Jack. Together, we cover the formation of Jack's legal and psychiatric team. As a reminder, Max's series of articles on Ruby can be found here: https://www.kennedysandking.com/john-f-kennedy-articles/jack-ruby-a-review-and-reassessment-part-

We are back with another installment of our ongoing miniseries about the two women who pointed a gun at President Gerald Ford in the fateful month of September 1975.  This week we continue our exploration into the life and times of the first of these two, Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme. One of our goals with this miniseries has been to trace the events and experiences that ultimately led these women to their actions, and weaving their lives and would-be assassinations into our larger narrative of the integrated spectacle.  As for Squeaky, we started out by setting the scene of her dystopian suburban upbringing in the 1950s and 60s.  Her father worked for weapons manufacturer, Northrop Aircraft, and was a weird guy to say the least.  He was abusive to Squeaky and the rest of his family (as well as anyone around them).  The tension that this created in the house led to regular blowout fights which ultimately led Fromme into the arms of Mr. Helter Skelter himself, Charles Manson.  When we left off last, Squeaky, Charlie, and the fledgling flock of Mansonites were living a nomadic life, traveling to various parks and remote wilderness locations, as well as cities and towns throughout the American West, as their “family” grew. In this episode we link up with Squeaky as the Manson family gives up the nomadic life and takes up residence in LA, first at Beach Boy Dennis Wilson’s estate, and later at the Spahn movie ranch in Hollywood. We discuss Squeaky’s unsettling role in the family’s sexual grooming of teenagers, and her later role as caretaker for the elderly George Spahn, pondering the parallels between Charles Manson and Jeffrey Epstein, and between Squeaky and Ghislaine Maxwell.  Finally, we will discuss how Squeaky - who claimed she never saw anyone kill anything in her life - lived through, processed, and pontificated about the family’s various homicides and highly spectacular trials therefore. Buckle up because this magical mystery tour is heading in some dark directions.

We are back with another installment of our new series-within-a-series, beginning our excavation into the first lady-shooter who took aim at Gerald Ford in September 1975, Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme (pronounced “frow-me,” rhymes with “throw me”). We start at the beginning, with her upbringing in the contradictory world of Westchester Los Angeles where the barbecues and manicured lawns were financed by the barbecuing of human flesh by the warplanes and munitions fabricated by southern California's booming aerospace industry. Lyn’s father was a stern, teutonic, probably abusive disciplinarian who worked as an engineer for Northrop aircraft (now part of Northrop Grumman), a mainstay in the military industrial complex. To escape from her fraught home life, Lyn partook in the art of dance, just like Betty Ford as our longtime listeners will recall.As she grew up, the tensions with her father grew and so did her time away from home, engaged in productive pursuits like poetry and remunerated work, as well as escalating acts of teenage rebellion. Finally, she moved out of the house entirely and met Charlie Manson almost immediately. She’d join him on a trip up to the Bay Area and the redwoods of Mendocino in the summer of love, 1967. Throughout their trippy times in the North, Charlie and the girls frequented the infamous Haight-Ashbury Free Medical Clinic, which the likes of Dr. Jolly West had turned into a recruitment center for test subjects; a laboratory for human experimentation on unwitting, disposable hippies.Squeaky’s boomer childhood gives us yet another sharpened lens through which to view the consolidation of the fourth reich, the integration of the spectacle, and the preemptive destruction of the burgeoning movement for radical social change that characterized the 1960s and 70s.

We are back with another installment of our excavation into the U.S. Congress with guest Andrew Myslik, who worked for Rep. Rashida Tlaib as a staffer for her first 7 years in office. Our anchor point for discussion is Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill.” Without getting too in the weeds, we cover what’s in it, who wins and who loses. Spoiler alert: the winners, as always, are the ruling class. Billionaires, multinationals, military-industrial-tech-surveillance-infotainment-industrial complex. The losers are everybody else, especially the poor and marginalized. We hear from Andrew about how the game is rigged against democracy, how corporate interests take ownership and exercise control over the so-called people’s representatives. We consider how the simultaneous loss of legitimacy by the fascist state and worsening of conditions for Americans - especially Black and Brown people - is leading to a new Amerikan Apartheid. Just one piece of a larger movement for global Apartheid bearing down on us from the “civilized” Western world. Many of our rulers want that, and we’re all but powerless to stop them through the traditionally conceived “democratic” channels. So what then?Support us on Patreon: Patreon.com/fourthreicharchaeologyFollow us on X and IG @fourthreichpod

This week Don is back with another guest: Andrew Myslik - a former legislative aide to Representative Rashida Tlaib. Andrew joined Rashida’s Congressional staff at the very beginning of her career on the hill, spending several years in her office until leaving recently. This will be the first installment of yet another Fourth Reich Archaeology excavation into the workings of Congress, that Amerikan Reichstag. In this episode, we dig into the inner workings of Congress and begin to explore how the corruption machine works to ensure that the so-called “People’s House” is run for the benefit of corporate persons (who, since the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, have all the rights of human beings) rather than us flesh-and-blood mortals. Since Congress is ultimately so monomaniacally geared towards the enrichment of war profiteers and the glorification of Israel and its genocidal exterminationist agenda, we also spend time exploring how and why that is. This is Andrew’s podcast debut, and we feel privileged to be the first pod to have him on to share his insights into the inner-workings of the legislative branch. If you can believe it, we’re even able to find a glimmer of hope in the morass, and we look forward to continuing the discussion with Andrew in future installments of this series. Patreon: www.patreon.com/fourthreicharchaeologyEmail: fourthreichpod@gmail.comSocials: @fourthreichpod

This week marks the fifth installment of our ongoing Geopolitik series. More so than any of our other excavations, we’ve been proceeding with Geopolitik as if it were an actual archeological dig. Recall that we began with a surface level survey on the field of geopolitics itself, tracing the pseudoscience back to its roots in the British Empire, its passage through the Third Reich, and its handoff from the Nazis to the American empire. We went on to examine the geopolitical goals of the Trump administration in Europe, in Latin America, and here at home, always paying attention to the inadequate and ultimately collaborationist alternative on offer from the Democratic party. We then explored the lifeblood that powers the expansion and progression of the Fourth Reich–the successive series of genocides that the United States has been responsible for since before this place was even a country. Last week, we discussed the use of genocidal ideology to get away with this genocidal project, drawing on white supremacist myths of racial superiority and the dehumanization of any group of people that got in the way. In this episode we dig through yet another level of substrate, and unearth the foundation on which ideology rests–culture and identity. In modern society, culture and identity are developed, cultivated, and largely manipulated by media (movies, tv, music, books). And in the 21st century, media can be best understood as spectacle. We turn to the work of the legendary Marxist theorist, Guy Debord, and his foundational work “Society of the Spectacle.” We’ve referenced Debord’s work in prior episodes and we often talk about spectacle during our excavations, but never have we dug into Debord like we do in this one. As if it were written yesterday, Debord’s Society of the Spectacle so accurately describes the current state of affairs where spectacle serves as both the result and the justification of the existing mode of production. It exists to keep working class folks alienated, numb, and incapable of doing anything other than consume. In a late stage free market democracy like ours, converting citizens into passive consumers would not be possible were it not for spectacle. Buckle up because this one has another cover by Don. As always, we are so thankful for our listening audience. If you’re able, please consider throwing us some dollars on Patreon to help keep our engines running: www.patreon.com/fourthreicharchaeology You can read Society of the Spectacle here: https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/debord/society.htmAnd Comments on the Society of the Spectacle here: https://monoskop.org/images/3/3b/Debord_Guy_Comments_on_the_Society_of_the_Spectacle_1990.pdf

We're back this week with the fourth installment of our ongoing Geopolitik series. Picking up where we left off, we continue our exploration into the normalization of genocide in the Fourth Reich. Despite the fact that genocide is reviled as one of (if not THE) worst crime against humanity, as we discussed in Part 3 it is hard to remember a time when the United States was not involved in genocidal violence in its relentless quest for global hegemony and imperial domination. This time, we approach the subject through the lens of ideology—specifically, white supremacist and Nazi ideology—and examine the dialectical relationship between genocidal tendencies in American foreign policy and the resurgence of white supremacist ideology within American society. Beginning well before the United States officially became a country, it has always relied on racialized violence in pursuit of economic exploitation, territorial expansion, and eventually the expansion of markets in which to plunder natural resources and discipline masses of workers. We begin our excavation by examining the recent backlash to “DEI” initiatives. We point the finger at the hypocritical weaponization of “anti-racism” discourse to shift the blame for racial inequality and strife away from the economic system and its beneficiaries and onto the subjective beliefs and behaviors of the working class. We then trace how this paradigm teed up the opportunity for the political right to use anti-DEI and anti-woke rhetoric as a trojan horse for laundering Nazi-aligned beliefs into the mainstream. With Trump and his allies practically begging to kick off a constitutional crisis and claim even more dictatorial powers, the danger of this rising tide of American Nazism cannot be overstated.From there, we take a historical turn to analyze the white nationalist immigration policies emerging from the Trump administration, tracing their roots back to the inception of U.S. border policy—which, unsurprisingly, was grounded in deeply entrenched racist attitudes toward Mexicans and other immigrants of color. So pervasive is the Trump administration’s ideological commitment to white supremacy that it has shown a willingness to turn against its own, including judges appointed during Trump’s first term, to push its agenda forward.Throughout our discussion, as always, we bring you our analysis using the one-of-a-kind Fourth Reich Archaeology lens, and once again this episode features some original music from our co-host, Don. The outro song was produced by friend of the pod Compost Ghoul: https://soundcloud.com/compost-ghoulWe remain deeply grateful to our listening audience for your continued encouragement and support. If you’re able, please consider donating to help sustain this project: www.patreon.com/fourthreicharchaeology

This week, we are back with another excavation into the present moment, and once again, we are digging deep into its historical roots. The theme of the episode is genocide. First, we give a snapshot of the current moment within the broader trajectory of the US/Israeli genocide of the Palestinian people. In Gaza, in the West Bank, and even in the diaspora. Physically and intellectually. But as our listeners should know by now, we are not just “reading the news” out here. Instead, we are utilizing genocide as a lens to understand the Fourth Reich.Unfortunately, the current ongoing genocide is not the first genocide that has taken place since the Nazi Holocuast. In fact, genocide is a persistent and ongoing feature on the landscape of the Fourth Reich just as it was for the Third Reich. After all, the persistence of genocidal violence is an essential piece of the capitalist machinery that traps billions of poor people around the world in misery to prop up the extractive, exploitive apparatus of the “modern,” purportedly “civilized” lifestyles of the ruling class. So we situate the current genocide in its historical context and take head-on the liberal finger-wagging hypothetical that “the left” bears responsibility for Trump’s openly fascist excesses due to its rejection of Kamala Harris and refusal to support the institutional Democrat party. We’re calling BULL on that allegation, and in our deconstruction thereof, we spare no targets of our analytical ire.This is one of our most personal episodes yet. There are times when the discussion gets emotional. We are living in trying times, in times of great upheaval and the potential for great advancement. The two-faced fascist beast whose right hand (Republicans) and left hand (Democrats) strangle the life of the people, has shown its monstrosity for all the world to see. Genocide is always central. Its unpunished commission itself undermines the rule of law more than any policy position the Trump administration could take, no matter how extreme.We hope you enjoy. The episode also includes three original compositions and recordings from our very own “Angleton’s Orchids” aka Don. Now let’s let the truth be the wind under our wings and take to flight!

Join us this week in the first installment of what will be a periodic series focused on current events within our Reich, and the historical precedents in Reichs past.  We’re calling it “Fourth Reich Geopolitik.” After a little catch-up on some of the latest expressions of fascism in American politics, we go back to basics and wipe off our patented Fourth Reich lenses.  Recall that when we say “Fourth Reich,” what we refer to is a regime with the same capacity for cruelty and destruction as the high watermark of those qualities: the Third Reich.  To put a finer point on it, our modern US-led global capitalist world order–with the Trump administration at the helm–represents a continuation of the Nazi quest for world domination and the consolidation of capital that dates back to well before the industrial revolution.  We illustrate this continuity by a quick recounting of the “science” of Geopolitics, from the British Lord Halford Mackinder to the Nazi Karl Haushofer, to Haushofer’s American Jesuit acolyte, Edmund A. Walsh, the namesake of Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service.With our lenses polished, we turn to the real focus of this episode: making sense of the latest developments in the Trump administration’s foreign and domestic policy. As to foreign policy, we look at the war in Ukraine and see the imperial maneuvering of US foreign police reduced to tabloid-level spectacle.  While some might see Trump “sidling up to dictators” or “abandoning our allies,” we see him pulling a reverse-Nixon: Rather than opening up to China to push back on Russia’s global influence, the Trump team is teaming up with Russia to help it knock down the dominoes on the way to Beijing.We then turn inward, looking at domestic policy, and dissect how it is exactly that the Republican party went from the country club party of rich old white men to counting among its ranks the young tech crowd.  For this, we need not look further than Elon Musk.  With Musk, Trump gets not only a jester with a devout silicon valley following but also a vehicle to the growing concern his voter base has with fraud and corruption.  But while Trump and Musk claim they have a mandate from the people to hack away at the federal government to eliminate fraud and waste, their cuts reveal that they are focused largely on agencies–like the Dept. of Education and the CFPB–that have been on Donald Trump’s shit list since the early days of his campaign. We also look at the rhetorical ruse of the Populist Front of the Republican Party led by the likes of Steve Bannon, dissecting their ability to speak several truths only to lull people into a false sense of security and bait-and-switch into fascist eugenics.We try to maintain a positive attitude throughout it all, though admittedly, it is getting harder with every day. The time is nigh to make moves and organize strategically to build power, and if we are to make any progress in the right direction, we need to unfetter ourselves from the corrupt genocidal Democrat Party. Dig in and enjoy! And if you like what you are hearing please drop us a line, give us some support on Patreon, and spread the word! Fourth Reich Archaeology email: fourthreichpod@gmail.comFourth Reich Archaeology Patreon: patreon.com/fourthreicharchaeology

This week we bring you another current events episode because, frankly, there is just too much insanity going on right now to stay silent.  As with the last episode on current events, we take a good hard look at the sad state of affairs at home and abroad under the Trump administration, while reserving plenty of ire and disgust for the Democrats as well. You’ll recall that we primarily focused on the European Theater in our previous episode. This time, we look at the developments happening in the Americas.And while the developments are new, the story's contours are familiar.  First, you have the goons at ICE targeting individuals based on their political views. Over the last few days and weeks, we’ve witnessed activists like Mahmoud Khalil, Ranjani Srinivasan, and Radha Alawieh being targeted by the Fourth Reich Gestapo simply because they decided to exercise their constitutional right to free speech and speak up against genocide. As our listeners know full well, silencing dissent literally by disappearing dissenters is a tried and true tactic of fascism. We then turn to the Trump administration’s plan to deport hundreds, if not thousands, of Venezuelan nationals (for now) to El Salvador, where they will languish in concentration camps, out of reach from lawyers, journalists, and human rights defenders, as they await removal proceedings by Trump’s Department of Homeland Security. And, as far as we can tell, the strategy of deporting the undesirables is not going to end with the Venezuelans.  Trump’s lap dog “lil” Marco Rubio has even been in talks with El Salvador’s President Bukele to work out a plan to send undesirable U.S. citizens to serve their criminal sentences in Salvadoran black site jails. The rotten cherry on top of this putrid cake is that, in the past few weeks, the Trump administration has also targeted several prominent law firms in retaliation for their political involvement in the 2016 election and beyond.  Through executive orders, Trump has barred federal agencies from working with these law firms, revoked any security clearances that the firms' lawyers might have had, and even restricted their access to certain federal buildings.  If that sounds familiar, it should, as it is precisely the kind of thing that Adolf Hitler did back in the day. It’s the purge and intimidation of the nonconforming elements of the bourgeois elite to unify the ruling class behind the criminal state, in preparation to crush into submission the working classes when crisis inevitably hits.We give a brief preview of the economy and the ingredients for a crash stewing on the boiler, and draw just a couple of the seemingly innumerable parallels to previous fascist apex moments before bringing it all back home to what this podcast is all about: calling out both parties in the sorry spectacle that passes for a democracy, exposing the historical roots of their mutual fecklessness and self-interested cruelty, and urging our listeners to join us in building - albeit from a whisper - the foundations for a new political formation built on truth, justice, and love. In sum, the Fourth Reich alarm bells are ringing. These are scary times. So sit back, try to relax (we know that is a tall order these days), and be sure to put on that PPE—this dig is another one that qualifies for hazard pay.

This week, we're taking a break from the Warren Commission, but don't worry; JFK stuff still comes up as relevant context at the present moment. But mostly, we're back into current events to cover the inauguration of the new regime. Trump 2.0. On the one hand, as we've consistently argued, the U.S. is not a democracy but a corporate state investing the bare minimum to maintain a mere image of democracy. So in that sense, Trump is no different from Biden: both are just actors filling roles in the spectacle of politics.We begin the episode saying farewell and f-off to Joe Biden and his entire rotten, genocidal administration. We discuss Biden's and Blinken's farewell addresses, Kamala's uncertain future, and the bravery of journalists standing up for the victims of genocide in the face of violent arrest and slander. We live in a time when "freedom of speech" is being redefined to mean "freedom to espouse and inculcate hardcore racist and genocidal beliefs," while free-speech activity like protesting genocide is being redefined to mean "crime and terrorism." Biden certainly has a role in that, and Trump seems like more of the same.Then we cover the inauguration and first day of President Donald John Trump, "the king of crime." After a banger of a musical number underneath "pig man" Trump's imperial inaugural address, we cover the MANY parallels between Trump and Reagan, including but not limited to their near-identical initiatives to privatize the government under the direction of literal Nazis. We discuss some of the day-one executive orders and issue predictions about what we might see next (including initial thoughts on JFK disclosure!!). Disclaimer: any predictions may very well change; this damn world is crazy as hell! Nevertheless, the Fourth Reich Archaeology thesis - albeit dire - is vindicated daily. Enjoy!

Are you heading into Thanksgiving weekend wondering WTF you will talk about with family and friends? Fear not, dear listener; Fourth Reich Archaeology has got you covered. We dropped this exclusively pre-Thanksgiving for our Patreon subscribers (sign up to get more such treats!), but you know we won't hold out on our listeners, so here it is for free. We offer some fodder to break the ice on a subject that we’re sure you’ll agree is dinner conversation appropriate–the sad true fact that we are currently living in the Fourth Reich, and the latest election results are a painful reminder that that's true.In the third installment of our 2024 election coverage, we do a post-mortem of the spectacle and add our patented Fourth Reich Archaeology view to the discourse. We offer a verbal carving-knife to help you cut through the liberal doomerism weighing down so many of our friends and families in the wake of Trump’s win and share some thoughts on why we’re hopeful about the next four years. It’s not that we’re excited about Trump’s Killer Krony Krew; it’s that the mask of American fascism is slipping more and more, making the Fourth Reich Archaeology message resonate more than ever. You’ll want to listen to the very end of this one to catch the instructions for Fourth Reich Archaeology’s very first parlor game, which will be the perfect way to have some fun with your normie loved ones this holiday season. Music:​The Doors - “Five to One”​John Lennon - “Working Class Hero”​Blaze Foley - “Oval Room”​Mick Gordon - “Nazi Punks, gtfo”​Tom Waits - “Everything Goes to Hell”

Join us as we take a final dusting to the artifact-in-the-making that is the 2024 presidential election. Will we make an endorsement? Not likely. Will we have a few laughs? Definitely.We’ve subjected ourselves to hours upon hours of presidential slop. We went ears deep in the trough for you, listener. We’ll give a few highlights from Kamala’s performance on the Breakfast Club, Trump on Rogan, JD Vance on Tim Dillon. Seriously, we had to bathe with a steel loofah after listening to all this shit. Not unexpectedly, we conclude - while not begrudging anyone’s right to fear-vote democrat - that the two candidates for Hitler are pretty much a wash. Both pledge to continue committing genocide. Both pledge to criminalize immigration and build a wall. Both pledge to protect crypto assets (lol). It’s a race to the bottom and we ask aloud whether these parties are really trying to lose.In an election where the party of Dick Cheney is calling the OTHER guy fascist, you know you’re in the Fourth Reich. Hope this helps you keep your distance from the madness as the barbarians approach both sides of the gates.

This week on Fourth Reich Archaeology, we take a brief hiatus from Jerryworld and travel back to the present day for a special episode on the 2024 election cycle.  A true American spectacle, the sights and sounds of the 2024 campaign trail appear to have been inspired by the pomp and circumstance of modern professional wrestling. In fact, with a steady bombardment of character arcs, secret alliances, double-crosses, over-the-top walkout songs, cheesy catchphrases, and interludes from rappers and comedians to boot, you’ve been so busy being entertained this election cycle that you don’t even realize your favorite politician hasn’t said a lick about policy. While we otherwise may not know exactly what kind of terrible shit is going to come out of the mouths of our political leaders, you can always count on it being unhinged.  But lest you think we are departing from our favorite object of study... to the contrary, we apply the artifacts we've unearthed in the first three episodes of Jerryworld to help make sense of the senselessness of the 2024 presidential election. Indeed, the life and times of Jerry Ford are as relevant as ever. Whereas Gerald Ford's eventual identity as a mere brand ambassador for the entrenched powers that be had a ring of tragedy to it, Kamala and Donald inhabit a world of hyper-farce, playing the role of carnival-barker for feuding (but ultimately compatible) factions of the ruling class. Moreover, while there are issues each nominee has championed for their respective financial backers, or to pacify or incite their faithful followers, the substance of their actual policy positions on the things that really matter don’t meaningfully differ.  Like every election before it, 2024 will likely once again break the record for most expensive election ever. But in our view, money in politics nowadays isn't so much about swaying elections as inflating the spectacle of "democracy," generating viewership through the corporate media machine, and imposing hard limits on what is considered acceptable political discourse. Thus, to paraphrase our favorite Thomas Pynchon quote once again, the true election cycle is not the culmination of a democratic process but a celebration of markets. And to all our Jerry heads out there, don't fret—we will return to our regularly scheduled program next week with Jerryworld Episode 4. Meanwhile, check out our Patreon, which we're finally rolling out. We won't paywall any content just yet, but we do invite and encourage you all to get in on the ground floor. The sooner we can quit our day-jobs, the more time we can pour into the pod, and the deeper we can dig into the hellscape of the Fourth Reich.* * * * * * * Song List: Talking Heads – Once in a LifetimeBob Dylan – Masters of WarMetallica – For Whom the Bell Tolls Neutral Milk Hotel – Oh ComelyTrey Parker and Matt Stone - I’m a Little Bit Country David Bowie – Five Years Opening Clip is from Dr. Oblivion’s monologue in David Cronenberg’s Videodrome 

We are thrilled to be back with our friend from across the pond, researcher Max Arvo, for another installment of our excavation into the man who killed Lee Oswald, Jack Ruby. It's another split episode that you can find in all its 2+ hour glory on Patreon, or wait until Side B comes up here in the future.We start off by recapping and taking stock of our speculative findings thus far, from the motivating force behind Jack's desperate spate of phone calls to old mob pals, to whether and how he was brought into a larger conspiracy, to what was going through his mind as he took the fatal shot and surrendered his body to his friends on the Dallas Police Department.Then we pick up with our factual narrative where we left off in Part 3, including a deep rumination on the spectacular implications of this being the first-ever murder caught on live TV. To really drive the point home, we have condensed some of the best tidbits of ABC News's live coverage of the events of November 24, 1963 in one of our best Fourth Reich Archaeology mashups yet. Remember, that Sunday, Americans were glued to their TV sets to watch the president's casket carted from the White House to the Capitol, and Ruby's killing of Oswald interrupted the broadcast. Side B will cover the formation of Jack's legal and psychiatric team. Again, you can access the full episode today at patreon.com/fourthreicharchaeology. Otherwise you will have to wait.As a reminder, Max's series of articles on Ruby can be found here: https://www.kennedysandking.com/john-f-kennedy-articles/jack-ruby-a-review-and-reassessment-part-1

As promised, this is the second half of our play-by-play of Jack Ruby's manic wild ride leading up to his murder of Lee Harvey Oswald on live TV on November 24, 1963. We pick up right where we left off, deep into the night of November 22, with Ruby taking his roommate ("boyfriend"?), George Senator, and his employee-cum-tenant, Curtis Laverne "Larry" Cravard, on a quest to collect evidence of what he perceived to be an antisemitic false flag attempt to blame the Jews for Kennedy's assassination.We trace Jack's bizarre activities over the subsequent 32 hours leading up to the fatal moment at 11:21 AM on Sunday morning in the basement of the Dallas Police building. We get into some light speculation over what really happened, and what was going on in Jack's drug-addled, sleep-deprived, and desperate mind in the most decisive day and a half of his short life.Remember, if you want to hear the full 2+ hour Part 3 in its entirety, head on over to Patron.com/fourthreicharchaeology and sign up. We will be back soon with Max Arvo to cover the somehow-even-stranger events of the final years in Ruby's life, including his "treatment" by a team of spooked-up psychiatrists helmed by none other than Louis Jolyon "Jolly" West himself.