June 16, 2026
The Latest Political Victim of the Israel Lobby
Last month a seven-term Republican Congressman from Kentucky named Thomas Massie lost his primary, and he will be leaving office at the end of the current session of the House.
Except in the case of severe personal scandals, such primary defeats were once extremely rare in our political life, and no such scandal had ever attached itself to Massie's name. Instead, his votes and his ideology seemed to fit his rural district like a glove, and the MIT-educated engineer had never previously faced a serious challenge for renomination, winning his last few primaries with 75-80% of the vote, sometimes against well-funded opponents.
As a staunch libertarian-leaning conservative in the Ron Paul mold, Massie had long made a name for himself by sometimes being at the short end of near-unanimous House votes on various issues. But I think that he first came to my attention when he was interviewed by Tucker Carlson a couple of years ago.
Rep. Thomas Massie doesn't care what you think of him, which is pretty great.(3:19) Where Does US Debt End?
(10:32) Why Massie Voted 15 Times Against Funding Israel
(14:53) AIPAC
(34:04) Mitch McConnell
(42:25) Area 51
(50:32) Massie's Relationship with Trump
(57:09) Kill... pic.twitter.com/VBOiWjq056- Tucker Carlson (@TuckerCarlson) June 7, 2024
In that two hour discussion Massie explained that although he had always been friendly towards Israel, as a staunchly conservative libertarian he refused to support foreign aid to that country or any other, and he was also a strong opponent of our ongoing military involvement around the world.
One of the very surprising facts that Massie revealed in that conversation was that virtually all Republicans in Congress had accepted the presence of "an AIPAC minder," someone who would direct their votes on matters considered important to the Zionist State, and he assumed that the same was probably true of the vast majority of Democrats. However, Massie firmly rejected that demand, instead believing that his undivided loyalty should be to the constituents who elected him, the interests of America as a whole, and his own conscience. His political disclosures received very widespread attention and they naturally enraged the Israel Lobby.
During his 2024 presidential race, Donald Trump had campaigned on a promise to release all the government files regarding the activities of Jeffrey Epstein. But once in office he completely reversed his position, apparently under pressure from Israel and its partisans who feared that Epstein's close ties to Mossad would prove hugely embarrassing. This led Massie to co-sponsor the Epstein Files Transparency Act, which passed Congress and was enacted into law over Trump's strong opposition.
As a result, the Israel Lobby and Trump marked Massie for defeat in 2026, and Carlson interviewed him shortly before his primary. Polls showed that Massie enjoyed overwhelming support from the younger Republican voters in his district but this was completely reversed in the case of their older counterparts, whose knowledge of the world largely came from the intensely hostile coverage in FoxNews and the rest of the legacy media.
Probably the most outrageous attack on Massie had been the heavy broadcast of a television ad suggesting that he was having an adulterous affair with left-liberal Democratic Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) and Ilhan Omar, including fake AI images showing him checking into a hotel room with both of them simultaneously. To older, less technologically sophisticated Republican primary voters, "seeing was believing" and I don't doubt that almost all of them were sure that the faked images were absolutely real.
A few weeks later, Massie lost by a wide 10 point margin in the most expensive Congressional primary in American history. A total of $30 million was spent in the small, relatively cheap media market of rural Kentucky, with the bulk of the massive funding against him coming from three Zionist billionaires.
Carlson devoted another show to the implications of Massie's defeat, which he believed had completely destroyed the MAGA movement once championed by Trump. Instead, it was clear that American political life was overwhelmingly under the control of AIPAC and other elements of the Israel Lobby.
With the 250th anniversary of our original Fourth of July Independence Day now just a couple of weeks away, Carlson recently went so far as to declare that America had now obviously lost its own national sovereignty.
Massie's striking defeat by pro-Israel forces was merely the latest in their very long series of political victories, a pattern that had stretched back for decades.
In the 2024 election cycle, prominent left-wing black Democrats Cori Bush and Jamaal Bowman had been viewed as insufficiently deferential to the demands of the Israel Lobby, even expressing some public sympathy for the innocent civilians of Gaza as they suffered horrific massacres at that hands of the Israeli military. Therefore, both were targeted and defeated in their primaries by massively funded challengers, with those two primary races becoming the most expensive in Congressional history.
During the gradual rise of the Israel Lobby to its position of near-total political supremacy, in 1974 it had played a central role in unseating Sen. William Fulbright, our longest serving chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and in 1984 it had done the same to Sen. Charles Percy, one of his Republican successors. A very long list of other political victims litters American history over the last couple of generations.
Rep. Paul Findley had been a highly regarded 11-term moderate Republican from Illinois, known for strong opposition to the Vietnam War and as co-author of the landmark 1973 War Powers Act. When he had suffered the same fate in 1982, he published They Dare to Speak Out, with that 1985 book describing the growing stranglehold of the Israel Lobby over the American political system.
Although I avidly followed domestic American politics during that period, tight media control ensured that I only had the vaguest awareness of Findley or his book. Perhaps based upon the very brief and extremely negative review in the New York Times I had always regarded the latter work as apparently rather disreputable and dishonest. Therefore, I was quite surprised when I bought and read it nearly twenty years ago, finding it very solidly documented and soberly written, while also discovering the notable Congressional achievements of its author.
A quarter-century after the appearance of Findley's book, John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago and Stephen Walt of Harvard University had published their 2007 bestseller The Israel Lobby and American Foreign Policy. Although I had already been long aware of nearly all the material it contained, I was impressed that two such notable scholars had been willing to put it all into print.
But although all these books and political developments certainly drew the attention of the thin slice of Americans who followed such things, I doubt that any of this much penetrated into the bulk of our population. The mainstream media almost always avoided all those issues, and it constituted the overwhelming source of most public information.
Although Mearsheimer's 2007 book had become a national bestseller, the bitter hostility of the Israel Lobby that he and his co-author had discussed led to his complete exclusion from mainstream outlets, and by the tenth anniversary of its publication in 2017, I suspect he wondered whether it would ever have any long-term impact.
However, over the last decade or more the growing power of the Internet and social media networks began offering entirely different channels of information. These were especially used by younger Americans, and in recent years these changes have been further magnified by the growing number of podcasters taking advantage of YouTube and other video platforms, whose technological maturity has allowed them to increasingly replace the traditional electronic media.
So although the Israel Lobby still reigns politically supreme, Mearsheimer and others of similar views have become ubiquitous across the alternative media outlets whose growing popularity is steadily eclipsing the mainstream media as our primary source of information. Many topics previously confined to furtive remarks by anonymous individuals on obscure websites are now readily discussed on shows attracting many millions of viewers.
Fifty-Nine Years After the Attack on the U.S.S. Liberty
As he battled for political survival in the most expensive House primary in American history, Massie greatly increased his national profile, and three weeks after his loss he deployed that new fame in extremely effective fashion.
Still holding his seat for the next few months, Massie took to the floor of the House on June 8th and gave a short speech marking the fifty-ninth anniversary of the Israeli attack on the U.S.S. Liberty, describing the facts of an important 1967 historical incident that was probably known only to a sliver of the American public. Various different YouTube videos showed his speech, one of them accumulating some 600,000 views, and shorter clips were presented by numerous popular podcasters, probably reaching many hundreds of thousands of additional Americans.
Over the decades I'm sure that many dozens or even hundreds of our senators and congressmen had become fully aware of the Liberty Incident and what it revealed about our national situation. But prior to Massie, I don't think that a single one of them had ever mustered the courage to publicly present those facts to the American people, nor had any serving American official ever done such a thing.
Back in 2024 I had briefly outlined the story at the beginning of one of my articles, emphasizing that for decades the power of our mainstream media had deadened the public impact of that outrageous incident.
I've often suggested that our media functions as a powerful tool of mind-control, not too dissimilar from what might be found in the plotlines of classic science fiction. After spending weeks or months immersed in such a controlling narrative, thinking independent thoughts let alone completely breaking free becomes a very difficult undertaking. For most individuals, the whisper in the back of their skulls overwhelms their logical reasoning, while their emotional reactions are turned on or off as if by a switch.A perfect example of this came in the infamous U.S.S. Liberty incident of 1967. While peacefully sailing in international waters, our naval vessel was attacked by the Israelis, whose air and sea forces killed or wounded more than 200 American servicemen, and only by chance failed in their effort to sink the ship with no survivors. This constituted America's worst naval loss of life at enemy hands since the huge sea battles of World War II, and surely if any other nation in the world had been responsible, our swift and overwhelming military retaliation would have bombed its major cities to rubble and killed many thousands of its citizens, while perhaps also hunting down and executing all the enemy leaders who had ordered that unprovoked attack.
But instead our government completely covered up that incident at the time it occurred, and the only consequence was that the annual financial tribute we paid to the Jewish State steadily increased in size. Even when the facts finally came out a dozen years later, any outrage was confined to just a small sliver of our population, while the majority who heard the story vaguely assumed that since the media told them "nothing to see here" they should move on and pay no attention. Something that under normal circumstances might have been expected to provoke a major punitive war merely produced a few uncomfortable shrugs.
Given its large size and advanced weaponry, America stood as a physical colossus on the world stage of the 1960s, with no other country able to directly challenge our might. But we were still helpless before the nation that had attacked us because the small pro-Israel Jewish minority deployed its tools of media mind-control to transform us into powerless marionettes, jerked about by invisible strings.
Although my article primarily focused upon other matters, I followed those paragraphs with a link to a long and very detailed account of the Liberty incident that I had published in 2021:
Over 200 American servicemen were killed or wounded by Israeli machine-guns, rockets, napalm, and torpedoes, representing our greatest naval loss of life at enemy hands since World War II. Only tremendous luck and the heroic actions of the sailors prevented the Liberty from being sunk with all hands lost.The Israeli government quickly claimed that the attack had been accidental, a consequence of mistaken identification and the fog of war, but none of the survivors ever believed that story, nor did many of America's top political and military leaders, notably Secretary of State Dean Rusk, CIA Director Richard Helms, and numerous top officers, including a later Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Although a brief investigation ordered by President Lyndon Johnson quickly endorsed the Israeli account, over the next half-century the Liberty survivors regularly condemned that official verdict as a cover-up and a whitewash. Their deep outrage was only slightly assuaged by the flood of medals they had received from our guilt-ridden government, which established the Liberty as perhaps the most highly decorated ship in American naval history, at least with regard to a single engagement.
The real-life events of that day almost seem like a script out of Hollywood. The first wave of unmarked attacking jets had targeted and destroyed all of the Liberty's regular transmission antennas while also trying to jam all standard American broadcast frequencies to prevent any calls for help. A flotilla of torpedo boats later machine-gunned the life-rafts to ensure there would be no survivors. These relentless attacks lasted for more than an hour and completely perforated the vessel, with the sides and the decks being pitted by more than 800 holes larger than a man's fist, including 100 rocket-hits that were six to eight inches wide, and a 40 foot hole below the waterline produced by a torpedo strike. Only a miracle kept the ship afloat.
But the desperate sailors braved constant enemy fire to jury-rig a single transmission antenna, allowing them to send out an urgent plea for help. Their SOS was finally received by our nearby Sixth Fleet, whose commanders immediately dispatched two waves of jet fighters to rescue the Liberty and drive off the attackers, only to have both flights recalled by order of America's highest political leadership, which chose to abandon the Liberty and its crew to their fate. At the end, two large helicopters filled with commandos dressed in full battle gear and armed with assault weapons were preparing to board the Liberty, sweep its decks clear of any resistance, and sink it. But at that moment their headquarters apparently discovered that the ship had managed to report its plight to other American military forces, so the enemy broke off the attack and retreated. The first American assistance finally arrived seventeen hours after the first shots had been fired, as two destroyers reached the stricken vessel, which was still desperately trying to stay afloat.
This story combined so many elements of exceptional military heroism, political treachery, and success against all odds that if the Liberty had been attacked by any nation on earth except Israel, the inspirational events of June 8, 1967 might have become the basis for several big-budget, Oscar-nominated movies as well as a regular staple of television documentaries. Such a patriotic narrative would have provided very welcome relief from the concurrent military disaster our country was then facing in its Vietnam War debacle. But events involving serious misdeeds of the Jewish State are hardly viewed with great favor by the leading lights of our entertainment industry, and the story of the Liberty quickly vanished from sight so that today I doubt whether even one American in a hundred has ever heard of it.
Our news media has been almost as silent on the subject. In the immediate aftermath of the attack, there was naturally some coverage in our major newspapers and magazines, with several of the reports expressing considerable skepticism of the Israeli claims of having made an innocent mistake. But the Johnson Administration quickly imposed an extreme clampdown to suppress any challenges to the official story.
An American admiral soon met with all of the survivors in small groups, including the many dozens still hospitalized from their serious injuries, and he issued fearsome threats to those terrified young sailors, most of whom were still in their teens or early twenties. If any of them ever mentioned a word of what had happened—even to their mothers, fathers, or wives, let alone the media—they would immediately be court-martialed and end their lives in prison "or worse."
With our journalists having great difficulty finding any eyewitnesses willing to talk and our government firmly declaring that the attack had been an unfortunate instance of accidental "friendly fire," the newsmen quickly lost interest and the story faded from the headlines. Our government still remained so concerned about the smoldering embers of the incident that the surviving sailors were distributed across the other ships of our navy, apparently with efforts made to avoid having any of them serve together, which would have allowed them an opportunity to discuss the events they had barely survived.
The ensuing decade of the 1970s saw the Watergate Scandal unfold, culminating in the impeachment and resignation of a president. Numerous other sordid governmental scandals and abuses of power came to light in the years that followed, greatly eroding popular faith in the honesty of our government.
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These changed circumstances helped provide an opening to James M. Ennes, Jr., one of the young surviving Liberty officers, who defied the threats of prosecution and imprisonment in order to reveal to the world what had happened. Working closely with many of his fellow survivors, he spent years preparing a powerful manuscript and was introduced to a major publishing house by star New York Times reporter Neil Sheehan, who had written one of the earliest news accounts of the attack. His book Assault on the Liberty was released in 1979, producing the first major crack in the continuing wall of silence. Admiral Thomas Moorer, former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, contributed a Foreword to a later edition, and the facts and gripping eyewitness testimony almost conclusively established that the Israeli attack had been entirely intentional. There were quite a number of favorable early reviews and interviews, leading to strong initial sales and further media coverage.
But organized pro-Israel groups soon counterattacked with a widespread campaign of suppression, working to prevent book sales and distribution while pressuring such influential television shows as ABC's Good Morning America and CBS's Sixty Minutes into canceling their planned segments. Successful books may sell tens of thousands of copies, but popular television programs reach tens of millions, so only a sliver of the American public ever learned the story of the Liberty. However, those who were politically aware and interested in the topic now had a solid reference source to cite and distribute, and the book also sparked the creation of the Liberty Veterans Association, which began to demand a reopening of the case and an honest investigation of what had happened that day.
In my article I went on to explain that forty years after the attack, a Pulitzer Prize winning former New York Times journalist drew upon dozens of interviews and a large cache of newly declassified government documents to publish a major 5,400 word expose on the incident in the Chicago Tribune, completely demolishing the remaining shards of the long cover-up.
Tony Hart, a former communications operator at a relay station remembers listening to the words of Secretary of Defense McNamara as he personally ordered the recall of the jets sent to rescue the Liberty: "President [Lyndon] Johnson is not going to go to war or embarrass an American ally over a few sailors." This independently confirmed the account reported by a Liberty officer a few years earlier in Bamford's book.Aside from McNamara, nearly all the other senior members of the Johnson administration agreed with top intelligence advisor Clark Clifford that it was "inconceivable" that the attack had been a case of mistaken identity. NSA Director Lt. Gen. Marshall Carter later secretly testified to Congress that the attack "couldn't be anything else but deliberate," and numerous other former top national security officials provided similar statements to the Tribune, finally going on the record after forty years...
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A couple of years later in 2009, James Scott, a young, award-winning journalist and son of a Liberty survivor, published Attack on the Liberty, a book that seemed likely to become the final major account of the incident. Released by a prestigious mainstream press, the text ran more than 350 pages with copious notes and numerous photographs...the work seemed to very effectively summarize all of the main material from more than four decades of research and debate, probably becoming that standard text on the topic.
A great deal of information is also now easily available on the Internet. Alison Weir runs If Americans Knew, an activist organization focused on the Israel-Palestine conflict, and a section of her website provides a convenient repository of numerous primary source documents regarding the U.S.S. Liberty incident.
- American Pravda: Remembering the Liberty
- Ron Unz • The Unz Review • October 18, 2021 • 11,400 Word
At the end of my long article, I'd mentioned that in 2020 TruHistory had released an outstanding four-part documentary series on the story of the U.S.S. Liberty directed by Matthew Skow. The feature had very high production values and ran nearly five hours, including extensive interviews with the surviving crew members. Sacrificing Liberty is currently available for purchase or rent and I'd strongly recommend it, while freely watchable copies are also still available on Rumble and some other video platforms.
Last year popular conservative podcaster Candace Owens had revived the story of the U.S.S. Liberty when it was brought to her attention and she interviewed one of the survivors , with her excellent show attracting well over 6 million views and 60,000 comments on YouTube. But having that same story now told by a very high-profile Congressman on the floor of the House of Representatives obviously carried even greater weight.
The Assassination of President John F. Kennedy
The story of the Liberty is certainly an important one, but even more important has been the fact that it was successfully covered up and concealed from the American people for nearly six decades.
Most individuals find it extremely difficult to admit that their understanding of our country and its history might be very different from the actual reality. In such a process, the first step taken is always the most difficult, and once that initial breakthrough has been made, subsequent ones are far easier.
Thus, once people confirm for themselves the story of the Liberty and the media and governmental cover-up that suppressed it, they might become far more open to the possibility that other stories of great national importance may have been similarly concealed.
Because of its massive mainstream documentation, I think that the story of the U.S.S. Liberty is ideally suited to serving as that first introductory step.
And the best second step may be the assassination of President John F. Kennedy that had occurred just a few years earlier.
Kennedy was a patriotic American leader and an injured naval veteran of World War II. So if he had been in the White House in 1967, it is inconceivable that he would have prevented our nearby naval forces from rescuing the Liberty when it came under deadly attack, nor that the Israelis would have ever even dared do such a thing. But he had died from an assassin's bullet on November 22, 1963, and his successor Vice President Lyndon Johnson had spent his entire political career as one of our country's most unwavering supporters of Zionism, even sharply clashing with President Dwight Eisenhower regarding our policy towards Israel.
A foreign country that that was bold and ruthless enough to attempt to murder nearly 300 of our military servicemen on the high seas, killing many of them in the process, may reasonably be suspected of having committed other nefarious deeds.
Over the last few decades an enormous amount of persuasive evidence has come to light suggesting that Israel and its Mossad probably played a central role in the JFK Assassination, closely collaborating with Vice President Johnson. In 2018 I published a pair of articles on those historical events, the second of which focused on the identity of the likely culprits. As I wrote:
If a husband or wife is found murdered, with no obvious suspect or motive at hand, the normal response of the police is to carefully investigate the surviving spouse, and quite often this suspicion proves correct. Similarly, if you read in your newspapers that in some obscure Third World country two bitterly hostile leaders, both having unpronounceable names, had been sharing supreme political power until one was suddenly struck down in a mysterious assassination by unknown conspirators, your thoughts would certainly move in an obvious direction. Most Americans in the early 1960s did not perceive their own country's politics in such a light, but perhaps they were mistaken. As a total newcomer to the enormous, hidden world of JFK conspiracy analysis, I was immediately surprised by the mere sliver of suspicion directed towards Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson, the slain leader's immediate successor and the most obvious beneficiary.
But I noted that the very scanty discussion of Johnson as an obvious suspect was still far greater than any mention of Israel, which until the 1990s was totally ignored.
Almost twenty-five years ago the late Michael Collins Piper published Final Judgment presenting a very large body of circumstantial evidence that Israel and its Mossad secret intelligence service, together with their American collaborators, probably played a central role in the conspiracy.For decades following the 1963 assassination, virtually no suspicions had ever been directed towards Israel, and as a consequence none of the hundreds or thousands of assassination conspiracy books that appeared during the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s had hinted at any role for the Mossad, though nearly every other possible culprit, ranging from the Vatican to the Illuminati, came under scrutiny. Kennedy had received over 80% of the Jewish vote in his 1960 election, American Jews featured very prominently in his White House, and he was greatly lionized by Jewish media figures, celebrities, and intellectuals ranging from New York City to Hollywood to the Ivy League. Moreover, individuals with a Jewish background such as Mark Lane and Edward Epstein had been among the leading early proponents of an assassination conspiracy, with their controversial theories championed by influential Jewish cultural celebrities such as Mort Sahl and Norman Mailer. Given that the Kennedy Administration was widely perceived as pro-Israel, there seemed no possible motive for any Mossad involvement, and bizarre, totally unsubstantiated accusations of such a monumental nature directed against the Jewish state were hardly likely to gain much traction in an overwhelmingly pro-Israel publishing industry.
However, in the early 1990s highly regarded journalists and researchers began exposing the circumstances surrounding the development of Israel's nuclear weapons arsenal. Seymour Hersh's 1991 book The Samson Option: Israel's Nuclear Arsenal and American Foreign Policy described the extreme efforts of the Kennedy Administration to force Israel to allow international inspections of its allegedly non-military nuclear reactor at Dimona, and thereby prevent its use in producing nuclear weapons. Dangerous Liaisons: The Inside Story of the U.S.-Israeli Covert Relationship by Andrew and Leslie Cockburn appeared in the same year, and covered similar ground.
Although entirely hidden from public awareness at the time, the early 1960s political conflict between the American and Israeli governments over nuclear weapons development had represented a top foreign policy priority of the Kennedy Administration, which had made nuclear non-proliferation one of its central international initiatives. It is notable that John McCone, Kennedy's choice as CIA Director, had previously served on the Atomic Energy Commission under Eisenhower, being the individual who leaked the fact that Israel was building a nuclear reactor to produce plutonium.
The pressure and financial aid threats secretly applied to Israel by the Kennedy Administration eventually became so severe that they led to the resignation of Israel's founding Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion in June 1963. But all these efforts were almost entirely halted or reversed once Kennedy was replaced by Johnson in November of that same year. Piper notes that Stephen Green's 1984 book Taking Sides: America's Secret Relations With a Militant Israel had previously documented that U.S. Middle East Policy completely reversed itself following Kennedy's assassination, but this important finding had attracted little attention at the time.
Skeptics of a plausible institutional basis for a JFK assassination conspiracy have often noted the extreme continuity in both foreign and domestic policies between the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations, arguing that this casts severe doubt on any such possible motive. Although this analysis seems largely correct, America's behavior towards Israel and its nuclear weapons program stands as a very notable exception to this pattern.
An additional major area of concern for Israeli officials may have involved the efforts of the Kennedy Administration to sharply restrict the activities of pro-Israel political lobbies. During his 1960 presidential campaign, Kennedy had met in New York City with a group of wealthy Israel advocates, led by financier Abraham Feinberg, and they had offered enormous financial support in exchange for a controlling influence in Middle Eastern policy. Kennedy managed to fob them off with vague assurances, but he considered the incident so troubling that the next morning he sought out journalist Charles Bartlett, one of his closest friends, and expressed his outrage that American foreign policy might fall under the control of partisans of a foreign power, promising that if he became president, he would rectify that situation. And indeed, once he had installed his brother Robert as Attorney General, the latter initiated a major legal effort to force pro-Israel groups to register themselves as foreign agents, which would have drastically reduced their power and influence. But after JFK's death, this project was quickly abandoned, and as part of the settlement, the leading pro-Israel lobby merely agreed to reconstitute itself as AIPAC.
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Final Judgment went through a number of a reprintings following its original 1994 appearance, and by the sixth edition released in 2004, had grown to over 650 pages, including numerous long appendices and over 1100 footnotes, the overwhelming majority of these referencing fully mainstream sources. The body of the text was merely serviceable in organization and polish, reflecting the total boycott by all publishers, mainstream or alternative, but I found the contents themselves remarkable and generally quite compelling. Despite the most extreme blackout by all media outlets, the book sold more than 40,000 copies over the years, making it something of an underground bestseller, and surely bringing it to the attention of everyone in the JFK assassination research community, though apparently almost none of them were willing to mention its existence. I suspect these other writers realized that even any mere acknowledgement of the existence of the book, if only to ridicule or dismiss it, might prove fatal to their media and publishing career. Piper himself died in 2015, aged 54, suffering from the health problems and heavy-drinking often associated with grim poverty, and other journalists may have been reluctant to risk that same dismal fate...
However, among the cast of major suspects, I think that the most likely participant by far was Lyndon Johnson, based on any reasonable assessment of means, motive, and opportunity, as well as the enormous role he obviously must have played in facilitating the subsequent Warren Commission cover-up. Yet although such an obvious suspect must surely have been immediately apparent to any observer, Johnson seems to have received only a rather thin slice of the attention that books regularly directed to other, far less plausible suspects. So the clear dishonesty of the mainstream media in avoiding any recognition of a conspiracy seems matched by a second layer of dishonesty in the alternative media, which has done its best to avoid recognizing the most likely perpetrator.
And the third layer of media dishonesty is the most extreme of all. A quarter century ago, Final Judgment provided an enormous mass of circumstantial evidence suggesting a major, even dominant, role for the Israeli Mossad in organizing the elimination of both our 35rd president and also his younger brother, a scenario that seems second in likelihood only to that of Johnson's involvement. Yet Piper's hundreds of thousands of words of analysis have seemingly vanished into the ether, with very few of the major conspiracy researchers even willing to admit their awareness of a shocking book that sold over 40,000 copies, almost entirely by underground word-of-mouth.
- American Pravda: The JFK Assassination, Part I - What Happened?
- Ron Unz • The Unz Review • June 18, 2018 • 4,800 Words
- American Pravda: The JFK Assassination, Part II - Who Did It?
- Ron Unz • The Unz Review • June 25, 2018 • 8,000 Words
In the years that followed, I published a number of other articles presenting additional material in support of those conclusions, including a lengthy 2024 piece especially focused on Johnson's likely role:
Johnson had been a product of Texas politics and during the first half of the twentieth century his state seems to have borne a strong resemblance to a corrupt Third World country, whose vast oil wealth and lucrative federal programs offered enormous financial opportunities for those clever and ruthless enough to take advantage of them. Thus, Johnson was born dirt-poor, held low-paying government jobs throughout his entire life, yet in 1963 he took the oath of office as the wealthiest president in modern American history, having accumulated a personal fortune of over $100 million in present-day terms, with the financial payoffs from his corporate benefactors laundered through his wife's business. Johnson's striking wealth is so little remembered these days that a prominent political journalist with Texas roots expressed total disbelief when I mentioned those facts to him fifteen-odd years ago.Johnson's political and financial rise had relied upon stolen elections and massive government corruption schemes and these sometimes placed him in legal jeopardy. Given such difficulties, Nelson makes a strong case that the future president may have protected himself by arranging a long series of murders, with some of the stories being absolutely astonishing but apparently true. For example, in one bizarre 1961 incident that strangely foreshadowed the Warren Commission's "lone gunman" finding, a federal government inspector investigating a huge Texas corruption scheme involving a close LBJ ally rejected various attempts to buy him off and was then found dead, shot five times in the chest and abdomen by a rifle; but his death was officially ruled a "suicide" by the local authorities, and reported as such with a straight face in the pages of the Washington Post...
Although he operated much more cautiously away from his Texas domain, Johnson seems to have adopted similarly ruthless methods in DC, heavily relying upon corruption and blackmail to solidify his power base in the U.S. Senate over which he reigned during much of the 1950s. He also immediately recognized the power wielded by J. Edgar Hoover, whom he enlisted as one of his closest political allies, shrewdly buying a house just a few doors down from the longtime FBI director and living as a close neighbor for nearly twenty years...
Both Kennedy and his younger brother Robert detested Johnson and they had already selected Sen. Stuart Symington as the Vice Presidential nominee when suddenly at the last moment Johnson was placed on the ticket instead. Both Nelson and Seymour Hersh in The Dark Side of Camelot told this story and strongly argued that heavy use of personal blackmail was responsible for this sudden change of political plans rather than geographical ticket-balancing or any other legitimate factor...
Johnson had begun 1960 as the most powerful Democrat in America and he reasonably believed that his efforts had been crucial in winning the November race, so he naturally expected that he would play a major role in the new administration, even issuing grandiose demands for a huge political portfolio. But instead he was immediately sidelined and treated with complete disdain, soon becoming a forlorn figure in DC with no authority nor influence. With Johnson having lost his longtime power-base in the Senate, the Kennedys eventually made plans to get rid of him, and just a few days before the assassination, they were already discussing whom to place on the 1964 reelection ticket in his stead. They recognized that once purged, Johnson might become a dangerous and vindictive political foe, so they decided to remove that possibility by using the record of his massive corruption and many crimes in Texas to completely destroy him.
The recent fall of Bobby Baker, Johnson's key political henchman in the Senate, presented an excellent opportunity. So the Kennedys began orchestrating a media campaign to expose Johnson, intended to result in his political destruction and perhaps a lengthy prison sentence. James Wagenvoord was then the 27-year-old assistant to Life Magazine's executive editor, and in early November 2009 he emailed a note breaking his long decades of silence and telling the story of the massive expose against Johnson that had been pulled at the very last moment...
Thus, by mid-November 1963, Johnson seemed a desperate political figure at the absolute end of his rope. But a week later he was the President of the United States, and all those swirling scandals were suddenly forgotten, with the huge block of magazine space reserved for the story of his political destruction apparently instead filled by the coverage of the assassination that placed him in the White House.
- American Pravda: JFK, LBJ, and Our Great National Shame
- Ron Unz • The Unz Review • June 24, 2024 • 10,200 Words
In recent years, more and more individuals of mainstream respectability, never previously associated with conspiratorial narratives, have begun suggesting that Israel and its Mossad probably played an important role in the assassination of JFK, expressing such views without any of the furtiveness exhibited by the longtime members of the JFK conspiracy community. These examples included Anya Parampil of the Grayzone , former CIA officers Ray McGovern and Larry Johnson with the latter explicitly endorsing Piper's book, and Prof. Jeffrey Sachs . Last year Prof. John Mearsheimer rather delicately explained that "many Americans" believe that Israel killed JFK , while Col. Lawrence Wilkerson recently put himself into that category .
During his 2024 presidential campaign, Donald Trump had promised to release all the remaining JFK files, and soon after regaining the White House, he mostly followed through on that pledge, releasing the vast majority of them, thereby greatly reviving interest in that topic.
As people began sorting through that huge quantity of information, they noticed that so many of the long-hidden bits and pieces seemed to relate to Israel and also to former CIA Counter-Intelligence Chief James Jesus Angleton, who had spent decades working so closely with the Israeli Mossad that many regarded him as an Israeli intelligence asset.