by Ron Unz
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.
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 the 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 penetrated much 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.
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…
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 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.
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 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.
This prompted someone to interview me at length on the subject, allowing me to summarize all my conclusions:
- How Israel Killed the Kennedys
Ron Unz • The Unz Review • March 24, 2025 • 11,500 Words
Then in an interview earlier this year, famed CIA whistleblower John Kiriakou revealed that thousands of JFK files had still been held back and claimed that these pointed directly at the Israeli role in killing our 35th president.
For those who seek a more detailed discussion of this same historical reconstruction, I would strongly recommend the work of French conspiracy-researcher Laurent Guyénot, whose 2019 book The Unspoken Kennedy Truth is the best single exposition of the Israel/Mossad case for the JFK Assassination. Although I would not necessarily endorse every single element, this paperback summarizes all the important information and is short enough that it can easily be read in just a day or two.
Guyénot also presented this same controversial material in the form of a 2022 documentary available on YouTube. Although perhaps a bit too hagiographic, “Israel and the Assassinations of the Kennedy Brothers” likewise constitutes the best video introduction to that subject.
For those with shorter attention-spans, last year Candace Owens sketched out the entire case in a clip that ran less than three minutes.
There is a considerable irony in all of this. As I explained in my original 2018 article, I had spent nearly my entire life completely ignoring the JFK Assassination and never doubting the official narrative of the Warren Commission. Therefore, I have always regarded myself as an extreme latecomer to the entire topic.
But once I finally began to explore the issue, the evidence for the guilt of Lyndon Johnson and Israel seemed overwhelming to me, and I emphasized this in all my writings on the subject, which were very widely read and discussed.
So to my utter amazement, I have discovered that with the notable exception of Guyénot, I seem to have been virtually the only writer to ever endorse and promote the Piper Hypothesis. Therefore, a large fraction of those who now accuse the Israelis of having murdered our 35th president probably arrived at that idea either directly or indirectly through my own work.
The 9/11 Terrorist Attacks
President Kennedy met his end in Dallas almost 63 years ago and the thoroughly documented Israeli attack on the Liberty came a few years later. Some 80% of today’s Americans had not even been born back then, so many might argue that these are irrelevant stories of the dead past and should be disregarded for that reason.
But they reveal some very important truths about the nature of our media and our political leadership. If the true facts regarding such major incidents have been successfully concealed for so many decades, we must naturally wonder whether other important events might have suffered a similar fate.
In one of my earliest American Pravda articles I mentioned that the growing public doubts surrounding the official story of the JFK Assassination apparently gave rise to the widespread use of “conspiracy theory” as a term of abuse. Declassified CIA memos had suggested that the phrase be weaponized and used against those who questioned the conclusions of the Warren Commission that JFK had died at the hands of a crazed lone gunman.
- American Pravda: How the CIA Invented “Conspiracy Theories”
Ron Unz • The Unz Review • September 5, 2016 • 2,600 Words
Many of the massive recent events that have greatly reshaped our world have also given rise to widespread “conspiracy theories,” and some of these seem to fall into very much the same category.
Of these, probably the most dramatic were the 9/11 terrorist attacks whose quarter-century anniversary will arrive in less than three months. Those incidents led to many years of American warfare in the Middle East, destroying much of that entire region while costing our country thousands of lives and trillions of dollars.
As I gradually became convinced that much of what I had always believed about the JFK Assassination and certain other historical events was false, I naturally became similarly suspicious of the 9/11 story as well, and began a careful investigation of that topic.
I soon discovered that the official narrative promoted by our political and media establishment was almost certainly false. The obvious beneficiary of those attacks on America had been the State of Israel and there seemed overwhelming evidence that its agents and their local collaborators had played a central role. All of these important facts had been concealed from the American people in ways similar to the story of our murdered president.
My first article setting forth that analysis appeared in 2018. During the years that followed I published a number of others, with my 2023 article providing a good recapitulation of my views.
In that latter piece, I began by highlighting my recent discovery of important video evidence regarding the destruction of the WTC towers:
In sharp contrast, a few months ago I discovered a very sober and careful 2016 presentation by the late Prof. Graeme MacQueen to the Lawyers’ Committee for 9/11 Inquiry in NYC, focusing upon the evidence provided in government records obtained via freedom of information requests. This released material included interviews of more than 150 eyewitnesses who mentioned hearing small explosions as the buildings collapsed, with some of them describing these as the sort of synchronized series of blasts used in demolition projects. This important testimony, overwhelmingly by first responders and rescue workers, was totally inconsistent with the official explanation that the collapses had been caused by office fires and therefore was completely ignored and excluded from the published government report.
Prof. MacQueen had been a major figure in the 9/11 Truth movement and his presentation was made to a distinguished audience, so I was shocked that after four years his YouTube video had barely attracted 800 views.
In 2018 Israeli-born New York Times journalist Ronen Bergman had published Rise and Kill First, a highly authoritative history of the Israeli Mossad.
Although his 750 pages provided not a single hint that the organization had played any role in either the JFK Assassination or the 9/11 Attacks, I drew upon much of his important material to support my own reconstruction of what had happened in 2001.
I began by noting the very long history of Israeli terrorism, with these attacks often taking the form of false-flag operations.
One of history’s largest terrorist attacks prior to 9/11 was the 1946 bombing of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem by Zionist militants dressed as Arabs, which killed 91 people and largely destroyed the structure. In the famous Lavon Affair of 1954, Israeli agents launched a wave of terrorist attacks against Western targets in Egypt, intending to have those blamed on anti-Western Arab groups. There are strong claims that in 1950 Israeli Mossad agents began a series of false-flag terrorist bombings against Jewish targets in Baghdad, successfully using those violent methods to help persuade Iraq’s thousand-year-old Jewish community to emigrate to the Jewish state. In 1967, Israel launched a deliberate air and sea attack against the U.S.S. Liberty, intending to leave no survivors, killing or wounding over 200 American servicemen before word of the attack reached our Sixth Fleet and the Israelis withdrew.
The enormous extent of pro-Israel influence in world political and media circles meant that none of these brutal attacks ever drew serious retaliation, and in nearly all cases, they were quickly thrown down the memory hole, so that today probably no more than one in a hundred Americans is even aware of them. Furthermore, most of these incidents came to light due to chance circumstances, so we may easily suspect that many other attacks of a similar nature have never become part of the historical record.
Skeptics of the theory that the World Trade Center towers had been brought down by planted explosives have often pointed to the alleged difficulty of such a massive project. But those buildings were under the full control of Larry Silverstein, an ardent Zionist, who might have provided easy access. Meanwhile, I noted that Bergman’s account described the tremendous success of the Mossad in undertaking far more difficult terrorist operations in the heart of Beirut, a hostile Arab city:
Of these famous incidents, Bergman only includes mention of the King David Hotel bombing. But much later in his narrative, he describes the huge wave of false-flag terrorist attacks unleashed in 1981 by Israeli Defense Minister Ariel Sharon, who recruited a former high-ranking Mossad official to manage the project.
Under Israeli direction, large car bombs began exploding in the Palestinian neighborhoods of Beirut and other Lebanese cities, killing or injuring enormous numbers of civilians. A single attack in October inflicted nearly 400 casualties, and by December, there were eighteen bombings per month, with their effectiveness greatly enhanced by the use of innovative new Israeli drone technology. Official responsibility for all the attacks was claimed by a previously unknown Lebanese organization, but the intent was to provoke the PLO into military retaliation against Israel, thereby justifying Sharon’s planned invasion of the neighboring country.
Since the PLO stubbornly refused to take the bait, plans were put into motion for the huge bombing of an entire Beirut sports stadium using tons of explosives during a January 1st political ceremony, with the death and destruction expected to be “of unprecedented proportions, even in terms of Lebanon.” But Sharon’s political enemies learned of the plot and emphasized that many foreign diplomats including the Soviet ambassador were expected to be present and probably would be killed, so after a bitter debate, Prime Minister Begin ordered the attack aborted. A future Mossad chief mentions the major headaches they then faced in removing the large quantity of explosives that they had already planted within the structure.
I think that this thoroughly documented history of major Israeli false-flag terrorist attacks, including those against American and other Western targets, should be carefully kept in mind when we consider the 9/11 attacks, whose aftermath has massively transformed our society and cost us so many trillions of dollars.
I explained that for many years after the 9/11 Attacks I’d paid very little attention to the details and was hardly even aware of the existence of a 9/11 Truth movement. My foreign policy concerns were entirely focused upon our disastrous ongoing Iraq War and my fears that Bush might at any moment extend the conflict to Iran. Despite Neocon lies shamelessly echoed by our corrupt media, neither Iraq nor Iran had had anything whatsoever to do with the 9/11 attacks, so those 2001 events gradually faded in my mind, and I suspect the same may have been true for most other Americans.
But even so I was still aware of a few anomalies:
Admittedly, I’d occasionally heard of some considerable oddities regarding the 9/11 attacks here and there, and these certainly raised some suspicions. Most days I would glance at the Antiwar.com front page, and it seemed that some Israeli Mossad agents had been caught while filming the plane attacks in NYC, while a much larger Mossad “art student” spy operation around the country had also been broken up around the same time. Apparently, FoxNews had even broadcast a multi-part series on the latter topic before that expose was scuttled and “disappeared” under ADL pressure.
Although I wasn’t entirely sure about the credibility of those claims, it did seem plausible that Mossad had known of the attacks in advance and allowed them to proceed, recognizing the huge benefits that Israel would derive from the anti-Arab backlash. I think I was vaguely aware that Antiwar.com editorial director Justin Raimondo had published The Terror Enigma, a short book about some of those strange facts, bearing the provocative subtitle “9/11 and the Israeli Connection,” but I never considered reading it. In 2007, Counterpunch itself published a fascinating follow-up story about the arrest of that group of Israeli Mossad agents in NYC, who were caught filming and apparently celebrating the plane attacks on that fateful day, and the Mossad activity seemed to be far larger than I had previously realized. But all these details remained a little fuzzy in my mind next to my overriding concerns about wars in Iraq and Iran.
However, by 2011 I had gradually become much more suspicious:
Moreover, around that same time I’d stumbled across an astonishing detail of the 9/11 attacks that demonstrated the remarkable depths of my own ignorance. In a Counterpunch article, I’d discovered that immediately following the attacks, the supposed terrorist mastermind Osama bin Laden had publicly denied any involvement, even declaring that no good Muslim would have committed such deeds.
Once I checked around a little and fully confirmed that fact, I was flabbergasted. 9/11 was not only the most successful terrorist attack in the history of the world, but may have been greater in its physical magnitude than all past terrorist operations combined. The entire purpose of terrorism is to allow a small organization to show the world that it can inflict serious losses upon a powerful state, and I had never previously heard of any terrorist leader denying his role in a successful operation, let alone the greatest in history. Something seemed extremely wrong in the media-generated narrative that I had previously accepted. I began to wonder if I had been as deluded as the tens of millions of Americans in 2003 and 2004 who naively believed that Saddam had been the mastermind behind the September 11th attacks. We live in a world of illusions generated by our media, and I suddenly felt that I had noticed a tear in the paper-mache mountains displayed in the background of a Hollywood sound-stage. If Osama was probably not the author of 9/11, what other huge falsehoods had I blindly accepted?
A couple of years later, I came across a very interesting column by Eric Margolis, a prominent Canadian foreign policy journalist purged from the broadcast media for his strong opposition to the Iraq War. He had long published a weekly column in the Toronto Sun and when that tenure ended, he used his closing appearance to run a double-length piece expressing his very strong doubts about the official 9/11 story, even noting that the former director of Pakistani Intelligence insisted that Israel had been behind the attacks…
I eventually discovered that in 2003 former German Cabinet Minister Andreas von Bülow had published a best-selling book strongly suggesting that the CIA rather than Bin Laden was behind the attacks, while in 2007 former Italian President Francesco Cossiga had similarly argued that the CIA and the Israeli Mossad had been responsible, claiming that fact was well known among Western intelligence agencies.
Once I began investigating the 9/11 story and reading a number of the books by leading 9/11 Truthers such as Prof. David Ray Griffin I was very impressed by what I found:
And his books, together with the writings of his numerous colleagues and allies, revealed all sorts of very telling details, most of which had previously been unknown to me. I was also greatly impressed by the sheer number of seemingly reputable individuals of no apparent ideological bent who had become adherents of the 9/11 Truth movement over the years…
When utterly astonishing claims of an extremely controversial nature are made over a period of many years by numerous seemingly reputable academics and other experts, and they are entirely ignored or suppressed but never effectively rebutted, reasonable conclusions seem to point in an obvious direction. Based on my very recent readings in this topic, the total number of huge flaws in the official 9/11 story has now grown extremely long, probably numbering in the many dozens. Most of these individual items seem reasonably likely and if we decide that even just two or three of them are correct, we must totally reject the official narrative that so many of us have believed for so long…
Now I am merely just an amateur in the complex intelligence craft of extracting nuggets of truth from a mountain of manufactured falsehood. Although the arguments of the 9/11 Truth Movement seem quite persuasive to me, I would obviously have felt much more comfortable if they were seconded by an experienced professional, such as a top CIA analyst. A few years ago, I was shocked to discover that was indeed the case.
William Christison had spent 29 years at the CIA, rising to become one of its senior figures as Director of its Office of Regional and Political Analysis, with 200 research analysts serving under him. In August 2006, he published a remarkable 2,700 word article explaining why he no longer believed the official 9/11 story and felt sure that the 9/11 Commission Report constituted a cover-up, with the truth being quite different. The following year, he provided a forceful endorsement to one of Griffin’s books, writing that “[There’s] a strong body of evidence showing the official U.S. Government story of what happened on September 11, 2001 to be almost certainly a monstrous series of lies.” And Christison’s extreme 9/11 skepticism was seconded by that of many other highly regarded former US intelligence professionals.
We might expect that if a former CIA intelligence officer of Christison’s rank were to denounce the official 9/11 report as a fraud and a cover-up, such a story would constitute front-page news. But it was never reported anywhere in our mainstream media, and I only stumbled upon it a decade later…
With so many gaping holes in the official story of the events of seventeen years ago, each of us is free to choose to focus on those we personally consider most persuasive, and I have several of my own. Danish Chemistry professor Niels Harrit was one of the scientists who analyzed the debris of the destroyed buildings and detected the residual presence of nano-thermite, a military-grade explosive compound, and I found him quite credible during his hour-long interview on Red Ice Radio. The notion that an undamaged hijacker passport was found on an NYC street after the massive, fiery destruction of the skyscrapers is totally absurd, as was the claim that the top hijacker conveniently lost his luggage at one of the airports and it was found to contain a large mass of incriminating information. The testimonies of the dozens of firefighters who heard explosions just before the collapse of the buildings seems totally inexplicable under the official account. The sudden total collapse of Building Seven, never hit by any jetliners is also extremely implausible.
I now began focusing upon who had likely been behind the attacks.
Let us now suppose that the overwhelming weight of evidence is correct, and concur with high-ranking former CIA intelligence analysts, distinguished academics, and experienced professionals that the 9/11 attacks were not what they appeared to be. We recognize the extreme implausibility that three huge skyscrapers in New York City suddenly collapsed at free-fall velocity into their own footprints after just two of them were hit by airplanes, and also that a large civilian jetliner probably did not strike the Pentagon leaving behind absolutely no wreckage and only a small hole. What actually did happen, and more importantly, who was responsible?…
But the second question is probably the more important and relevant one, and I think it has always represented a source of extreme vulnerability to 9/11 Truthers.
The most typical approach, as generally followed in the numerous Griffin books, is to avoid the issue entirely and focus solely on the gaping flaws in the official narrative. This is a perfectly acceptable position but leaves all sorts of serious doubts. What organized group would have been sufficiently powerful and daring to carry off an attack of such vast scale against the central heart of the world’s sole superpower? And how were they possibly able to orchestrate such a massively effective media and political cover-up, even enlisting the participation of the U.S. government itself?
The much smaller fraction of 9/11 Truthers who choose to address this “whodunit” question seem to be overwhelmingly concentrated among rank-and-file grassroots activists rather than the prestigious experts, and they usually answer “inside job!” Their widespread belief seems to be that the top political leadership of the Bush Administration, probably including Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, had organized the terrorist attacks, either with or without the knowledge of their ignorant nominal superior, President George W. Bush. The suggested motives included justifying military attacks against various countries, supporting the financial interests of the powerful oil industry and military-industrial complex, and enabling the destruction of traditional American civil liberties. Since the vast majority of politically active Truthers seem to come from the far left of the ideological spectrum, they regard these notions as logical and almost self-evident…
Bush critics properly ridiculed the president for his tongue-tied statement that the 9/11 terrorists had attacked America “for its freedoms” and Truthers have reasonably branded as implausible the claims that the massive attacks were organized by a cave-dwelling Islamic preacher. But the suggestion that they were led and organized by the top figures of the Bush Administration seems even more preposterous.
Cheney and Rumsfeld had both spent decades as stalwarts of the moderate pro-business wing of the Republican Party, each serving in top government positions and also as CEOs of major corporations. The notion that they capped their careers by joining a new Republican administration in early 2001 and almost immediately set about organizing a gigantic false-flag terrorist attack upon the proudest towers of our largest city together with our own national military headquarters, intending to kill many thousands of Americans in the process, is too ridiculous to even be part of a leftist political satire.
Let’s step back a bit. In the entire history of the world, I can think of no documented case in which the top political leadership of a country has launched a major false-flag attack upon its own centers of power and finance and tried to kill large numbers of its own people. The America of 2001 was a peaceful and prosperous country run by relatively bland political leaders focused upon the traditional Republican goals of enacting tax-cuts for the rich and reducing environmental regulations. Too many Truther activists have apparently drawn their understanding of the world from the caricatures of leftist comic-books in which corporate Republicans are all diabolical Dr. Evils, seeking to kill Americans out of sheer malevolence, and Alexander Cockburn was absolutely correct to ridicule them at least on that particular score.
Consider also the simple practicalities of the situation. The gigantic nature of the 9/11 attacks as postulated by the Truth movement would have clearly required enormous planning and probably involved the work of many dozens or even hundreds of skilled agents. Ordering CIA operatives or special military units to organize secret attacks against civilian targets in Venezuela or Yemen is one thing, but directing them to mount attacks against the Pentagon and the heart of New York City would be fraught with stupendous risk…
The whole scenario of top American leaders being the masterminds behind 9/11 is beyond ridiculous, and those 9/11 Truthers who make or imply such claims—doing so without a single shred of solid evidence—have unfortunately played a major role in discrediting their entire movement. In fact, the common meaning of the “inside job” scenario is so patently absurd and self-defeating that one might even suspect that the claim was encouraged by those seeking to discredit the entire 9/11 Truth movement as a consequence.
The focus on Cheney and Rumsfeld seems particularly ill-directed…they were the archetypical examples of moderate business-type mainstream Republicans, stretching all the way back to their years at the top of the Ford Administration during the mid-1970s…
By 2000, the Neocons had gained almost total control of all the major conservative/Republican media outlets and the foreign policy wings of nearly all the similarly aligned thinktanks in DC, successfully purging most of their traditional opponents. So although Cheney and Rumsfeld were not themselves Neocons, they were swimming in a Neocon sea, with a very large fraction of all the information they received coming from such sources and with their top aides such as “Scooter” Libby, Paul Wolfowitz, and Douglas Feith being Neocons. Rumsfeld was already somewhat elderly while Cheney had suffered several heart-attacks starting at age 37, so under those circumstances it may have been relatively easy for them to be shifted toward certain policy positions…
It does seem entirely plausible that Cheney, Rumsfeld, and other top Bush leaders may have been manipulated into taking certain actions that inadvertently fostered the 9/11 plot, while a few lower-level Bush appointees might have been more directly involved, perhaps even as outright conspirators. But I do not think this is the usual meaning of the “inside job” accusation.
- American Pravda: Remembering the 9/11 Truth Movement
Ron Unz • The Unz Review • September 11, 2023 • 9,800 Words
Last year Tucker Carlson released an excellent five-part documentary series on the 9/11 Attacks, originally intended to coincide with the twenty-fourth anniversary, and it attracted many millions of views, helping to revive an issue that had largely faded from public debate.
The first and most important step on the path of 9/11 Truth is to recognize that the official story was entirely false, and Carlson’s one-minute trailer did so in very strong fashion.
Indeed, that was the main focus of the entire series rather than directly fingering the Israelis or anyone else as the prime suspects. As a result, some ardent 9/11 Truther sharply denounced the series for exactly that reason, but I felt that his strategy was the correct one since it opened the series to much wider media coverage than would otherwise have been the case. Popular podcasters such as Piers Morgan and the Young Turks brought it to the attention of their own large audiences.
Meanwhile, the fourth episode included enough elements of apparent Israeli involvement that anyone interested in pursuing those clues could easily do so.
At the time, I discussed all of this in a pair of articles:
- Tucker Carlson and the Resurrection of the 9/11 Truth Movement? Part I
Ron Unz • The Unz Review • September 29, 2025 • 7,400 Words - Tucker Carlson and the Resurrection of the 9/11 Truth Movement? Part II
Ron Unz • The Unz Review • October 6, 2025 • 9,800 Words
Ripples may gradually cover a still pond and their ultimate impact cannot easily be predicted.
From the beginning of our ill-fated Iran War, Prof. Mohammed Marandi of Tehran University has become a regular guest on the leading alt-media podcasts. In one of his interviews a few weeks ago, he mentioned that he had always dismissed 9/11 conspiracy theories as total nonsense, but after watching Carlson’s series, he had become convinced that they were absolutely true.
I suspect that considerable numbers of other respectable, mainstream figures in our journalistic, academic and political communities may have been quietly influenced in that same way even if they do not publicly reveal that fact.
The Assassination of Charlie Kirk
As the polling data in the Massie primary indicated, there was an enormous age-skew among those voters who supported Massie, with older Americans deriving their understanding of the world from the traditional electronic media, while their youthful counterparts relied upon the Internet and social media. This similarly explained their radically different views about Israel.
For such younger Americans, the attack on the U.S.S. Liberty and the JFK Assassination were ancient history, events that occurred before most of their parents were born. And while I consider the terrorist attacks of 9/11 and the subsequent Iraq War part of the relatively recent past, many of those younger Americans were not yet alive at the time or only dimly remember those matters from their childhood.
But the assassination of Charlie Kirk last year falls into an entirely different category, a searing event forever etched into their memory. The conservative leader was shot dead at the age of 31 by a sniper while speaking at a university campus, with the video showing his killing becoming one of the most viral in history.
Prior to his tragic death, I’d paid little attention to Kirk, only being vaguely aware that he was the founder of Turning Point USA, a successful mega-donor funded conservative activist organization aimed at youth.
Given my ignorance of him and his activities, I was stunned by the enormous outpouring of media coverage his killing generated, seemingly greater than might have been accorded many important American elected officials or even major world leaders under similar circumstances. All our top newspapers gave his story large, front-page headlines, and the discussion of Kirk’s assassination and its implications entirely blanketed much of the Internet.
I learned that he had dropped out of college at the age of 18 and founded TPUSA, then spent the next dozen years building it into one of the largest grassroots political organizations in America. Millions of youthful conservatives regularly listened to his daily political podcast. His stature in Republican circles was enormous and I was shocked to learn that knowledgeable journalists such as Max Blumenthal expected him to eventually mount a serious campaign for the presidency, perhaps even running as soon as the 2028 election cycle.
At the time of his death he had been a personal hero to many millions of young Republicans and conservatives, so for them his killing must have had some of the same psychological impact as the death of our president in Dallas more than six decades earlier.
As I wrote at the time, another surprising similarity between the cases of Kennedy and Kirk had been the manner of the assassinations.
From media reports I soon discovered that Kirk had received many death threats over the years. Therefore, he had taken steps to ensure that he was extremely well protected against any such attack, surrounding himself with a professional security detail…But none of that availed him against the sniper who killed him with a single, well-placed shot, hitting him in the neck from a distance of around 200 yards.
Over the years and the decades, considerable numbers of prominent Americans had been targeted by an assassin’s bullets but almost none of them had ever been killed in such a classic manner. Instead, a large majority of the victims were shot at close range with simple handguns, and the deranged attackers were often immediately apprehended at the scene.
Consider the case of last year’s killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Robert Thompson by someone angry over health insurance policies, with the corporate executive shot as he entered a midtown Manhattan hotel, totally unprotected against any such attack. Earlier this year, a Minnesota state representative and her husband had both been killed at home by an agitated gunman who merely knocked on their front-door…
Even last year’s two unsuccessful assassination attempts against Trump during his presidential campaign seemed far less professional than Kirk’s killing. In each case, the carelessness and incompetence of the attacker was balanced out by the severe security lapses of Trump’s Secret Service team.
A sniper firing at long range seems the most classic sort of professional political assassination but the last such examples that come to my mind were the 1960s killings of JFK and MLK…Just as with the Kirk assassination, the killing of Kennedy in Dallas also involved a heavily-guarded public figure slain by a sniper who initially escaped…So in many regards, the closest historical parallel to Kirk’s assassination was that of JFK sixty-two years earlier.
As I wrote, the closest match to Kirk’s killing may have been the 1963 assassination of President Kennedy. But whereas Kirk was killed by a single bullet, at least three shots had been fired at Kennedy, one of which went completely wild, even though the sniper was firing from roughly half the distance.
So all things considered, Kirk’s killing would indeed seem to rank as perhaps the most professional political assassination in modern American history. Over the decades, I’ve frequently seen examples of very well-protected American VIPs targeted for death by a distant sniper firing a scoped rifle. But all of those scenes had played out in films and television shows, while almost nothing like that had ever happened in real life.
Unfortunately, far darker parallels between the Kennedy and Kirk assassinations almost immediately came to my mind once I’d heard of the latter’s death.
As I’d mentioned, for the last dozen years I’d paid almost no attention to Kirk or his political activities, but that had begun to change over the last couple of months. After Trump reversed himself on the release of the Jeffrey Epstein documents, a huge political firestorm had erupted, with many erstwhile Trump supporters expressing a sense of bitter betrayal. This led me to publish a long article about the controversy and the broader issue of blackmail in American politics.
Towards the beginning of my discussion, I’d noted that Tucker Carlson had been invited to speak at the national convention of Kirk’s organization. Carlson had used that opportunity to very courageously inform all those thousands of young conservative activists that almost everyone in DC assumed that Epstein had been working for the Israeli Mossad, providing that foreign spy organization with the blackmail evidence it used to maintain control of our own elected officials.
For generations, the American conservative movement has been notoriously pro-Israel, so I was greatly surprised that the huge audience of young conservatives overcame their lifelong indoctrination, strongly supporting Carlson’s bold statements and even giving him wild cheers.
Former FoxNews host Tucker Carlson is probably the biggest figure in today’s fragmented media landscape and a crucial supporter of Donald Trump. But he and many others like him have strongly denounced the administration’s reversal on the release of the Epstein files.
The largest youthful pro-Trump organization is called Turning Point USA, and Carlson happened to give a speech to the huge audience at their annual convention a few days after Trump’s decision. He dramatically declared that not a single person he knew in DC doubted that Epstein had been running a blackmail operation on behalf of the Israeli Mossad, and despite that controversial statement his speech drew widespread cheers. This suggests that his remarks—and the positive reaction they attracted—may themselves mark “a turning point” in what had been decades of uniformly pro-Israel sentiments among American conservatives. So ideas once marginalized or considered entirely forbidden may now apparently be freely discussed, sometimes even attracting widespread support, and this may be the most important lasting legacy of the current political firestorm over the Epstein files.
Indeed, given Carlson’s words only the most willfully blind could fail to connect such Mossad operations with the unwavering levels of support that Israel has long enjoyed from our members of Congress. Over the last couple of years, nearly the entire rest of the world has reviled Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as one of modern history’s worst war-criminals, now under indictment by the International Court of Justice for his horrific ongoing massacre of Gaza’s helpless civilians. But when he has visited Congress, the trained barking seals of that political body have provided him endless standing ovations. Obviously the money and media deployed by the Israel Lobby explain most of this behavior, but the powerful role of blackmail has almost certainly supplemented those factors.
The notion that many of our own elected officials are being ruthlessly blackmailed by a foreign power must surely outrage most patriotic Americans, and the increasing circulation of these ideas may eventually have important consequences. Just a few days after Carlson’s remarkable speech, Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, one of the fiercest MAGA partisans in Congress, surprisingly joined with Democrats Reps. Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar, two of her most leftwing colleagues, in voting to cut U.S. funding for Israel. This resolution only attracted a handful of supporters, but small cracks in a dam sometimes presage much larger breaks.
I’d always regarded Kirk as an absolutely committed supporter of Israel and the Zionist project, much like almost all other American conservatives. Therefore, I had been shocked by Kirk’s willingness to provide Carlson with such a high-profile platform to make a speech taking such a contrary position. I later discovered that Kirk had even strongly encouraged Carlson’s very controversial remarks.
In the weeks after Carlson’s remarkably candid speech and the reaction it drew, I’d come across a few scattered indications that Kirk was becoming far more publicly critical of Israel, perhaps even starting to follow the political trajectory of Candace Owens, who had originally come from a very similar ideological background.
Although I hadn’t been aware of it at the time, within hours of Kirk’s assassination, one of his past video clips sharply condemning the anti-white activism of Jewish groups in America went viral on the Internet, with this single Tweet viewed nearly six million times:
Given Kirk’s enormous popularity among conservative youth, the consequences of such a shift might have been dramatic so Kirk’s sudden, very professional assassination raised dark suspicions in my mind…
Therefore, a few hours after hearing of Kirk’s death, I very gingerly raised these possibilities with someone well situated in conservative circles who personally knew Kirk, and was shocked by his response. He unequivocally told me that everyone in Kirk’s circle, even including important Trump Administration officials, suspected that Israel had probably killed the young conservative leader. While such beliefs might not necessarily be correct, I was astonished that they were apparently so widespread without even a hint of those notions reported anywhere in the mainstream or conservative media.
- The Assassination of Charlie Kirk
Ron Unz • The Unz Review • September 15, 2025 • 6,000 Words
But two days after Kirk’s killing, that media silence was broken as the story I’d been privately told by a conservative insider was fully confirmed by a revelatory article published in the Grayzone by editors Max Blumenthal and Anya Parampil:
Charlie Kirk rejected an offer earlier this year from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to arrange a massive new infusion of Zionist money into his Turning Point USA (TPUSA) organization, America’s largest conservative youth association, according to a longtime friend of the slain commentator speaking on the condition of anonymity. The source told The Grayzone that the late pro-Trump influencer believed Netanyahu was trying to cow him into silence as he began to publicly question Israel’s overwhelming influence in Washington and demanded more space to criticize it.
In the weeks leading up to his September 10 assassination, Kirk had come to loathe the Israeli leader, regarding him as a “bully,” the source said. Kirk was disgusted by what he witnessed inside the Trump administration, where Netanyahu sought to personally dictate the president’s personnel decisions, and weaponized Israeli assets like billionaire donor Miriam Adelson to keep the White House firmly under its thumb.
According to Kirk’s friend, who also enjoyed access to President Donald Trump and his inner circle, Kirk strongly warned Trump last June against bombing Iran on Israel’s behalf. “Charlie was the only person who did that,” they said, recalling how Trump “barked at him” in response and angrily shut down the conversation. The source believes the incident confirmed in Kirk’s mind that the president of the United States had fallen under the control of a malign foreign power, and was leading his own country into a series of disastrous conflicts.
By the following month, Kirk had become the target of a sustained private campaign of intimidation and free-floating fury by wealthy and powerful allies of Netanyahu – figures he described in an interview as Jewish “leaders” and “stakeholders.”
“He was afraid of them,” the source emphasized.
At TPUSA, the rift with Israel widens
Kirk was 18 years old when he launched TPUSA in 2012. From its inception, his career was propelled by Zionist donors, who showered his young organization with money through neoconservative outfits like the David Horowitz Freedom Center. He repaid his wealthy backers over the years by unleashing a relentless firehose of anti-Palestinian and Islamophobic diatribes, accepting propaganda trips to Israel, and sternly shutting down nationalist forces challenging his support for Israel during TPUSA events. In the Trump era, few American gentiles had proved more valuable to the self-proclaimed Jewish state than Charlie Kirk.
But as Israel’s genocidal assault on the besieged Gaza Strip drove an unprecedented backlash within grassroots right-wing circles, where only 24% of younger Republicans now sympathize with Israel over the Palestinians, Kirk began to shift. At times, he toed the Israeli line, spreading disinformation about babies beheaded by Hamas on October 7, and denying the famine imposed on the population of Gaza. Yet he simultaneously ceded to his base, wondering aloud if Jeffrey Epstein was an Israeli intelligence asset, questioning whether the Israeli government allowed the October 7 attacks to proceed in order to advance long-term political goals, and parroting narratives familiar to his most vociferous critic on the right, streamer Nick Fuentes.
This July, at his TPUSA Student Action Summit, Kirk provided a forum for the right-wing grassroots to vent its fury about Israel’s political hammerlock on the Trump administration. There, speakers from former Fox News stalwarts Tucker Carlson and Megyn Kelly, to the anti-Zionist Jewish comedian Dave Smith, denounced Israel’s blood-soaked assault on the besieged Gaza Strip, branded Jeffrey Epstein as an Israeli intelligence asset, and openly taunted Zionist billionaires like Bill Ackman for “getting away with scams” despite having “no actual skills”…
Following the confab, Kirk was bombarded with infuriated text messages and phone calls from Netanyahu’s wealthy allies in the US, including many who had funded TPUSA. According to his longtime friend, the Zionist donors treated Kirk with outright contempt, essentially ordering him to fall back into line.
“He was being told what you’re not allowed to do, and it was driving him crazy,” Kirk’s friend recalled. The conservative youth leader was not only alienated by the hostile nature of the interactions, but “frightened” by the backlash.
The friend’s account dovetails with those of multiple right-wing commentators with access to Kirk.
“I think, in the end, Charlie was going through a spiritual transformation,” Candace Owens, a conservative influencer who shifted decisively against Israel after October 7, reflected after her friend’s killing. “I know it, he was going through a lot. There was a lot of pressure, and it’s hard for me to watch the people who were pressuring him just say the things that they’re saying.”
She continued: “They wanted him to lose everything for changing or even slightly modifying an opinion. It’s very hurtful to me.”
Kirk appeared visibly outraged during an August 6 interview with conservative host Megyn Kelly, as he discussed the menacing messages he was receiving from pro-Israel bigwigs.
“It’s all of the sudden: ‘oh, Charlie: he’s no longer with us.’ Wait a second—what does ‘with us’ mean, exactly? I’m an American, okay? I represent this country,” he explained, before addressing the powerful Zionist interests harassing him.
“The more that you guys privately and publicly call our character into question—which is not isolated, it would be one thing if it were just one text, or two texts; it is dozens of texts—then we start to say, ‘whoa, hold the boat here,’” Kirk continued. “To be fair, some really good Jewish friends say, ‘that’s not all of us’… But these are leaders here. These are stakeholders”…
According to Kirk’s longtime friend, Kirk’s resentment of Netanyahu and the Israel lobby was spreading within Trump’s inner circle. In fact, they said, the president himself was terrified of Netanyahu’s wrath, and feared the consequences of defying him…
The Israel-did-it theory
Kirk was killed this September 10 with a single shot fired by a sniper apparently positioned on a rooftop 200 meters away. He was shot while seated before a crowd of thousands at Utah State University in Orem, Utah on the first leg of his American Comeback Tour. The scene of Kirk collapsing from the impact of a gunshot to his neck just as he began answering a question about transgender mass shooters was perhaps the most shockingly vivid spectacle of assassination – and certainly the most viral – in human history.
There is currently no evidence of an Israeli government role in Kirk’s assassination. However, that has not stopped thousands of social media users from speculating that the pro-Trump operative’s shifting views on the issue contributed in some way to his death. By the time of publication, over 100,000 Twitter/X users have liked a September 11 post by libertarian influencer Ian Carroll declaring about Kirk, “He was their friend. He basically dedicated his life to them. And they murdered him in front of his family. Israel just shot themselves.”
Many advancing the unsubstantiated theory have pointed to a Twitter/X post by Harrison Smith, a personality at the pro-Trump Infowars network, stating on August 13 – almost a month before Kirk’s assassination – that he was told by “someone close to Charlie Kirk that Kirk thinks Israel will kill him if he turns against Israel.”
The frenzied speculation has set off shockwaves in Tel Aviv, where Netanyahu was compelled to explicitly deny that his government killed Kirk during a September 11 interview with NewsMax.
- Charlie Kirk refused Netanyahu funding offer, was ‘frightened’ by pro-Israel forces before death, friend reveals
Max Blumenthal and Anya Parampil • The Grayzone • September 12, 2025 • 2,100 Words
For those who prefer a different medium, an excellent video Tweeted out by Propaganda & Co. covered much of this same material and attracted more than a million views after just one day.
Blumenthal was also interviewed for an hour by Pulitzer Prize winning former New York Times journalist Chris Hedges, with some of the most important portions provided in a much shorter video:
In the article that I’d published days after Kirk’s assassination, I’d mentioned that despite the widespread suspicions directed against Israel, there were early media reports that the alleged assassin had been caught. According to the authorities, Tyler Robinson was a deranged lone gunman outraged by Kirk’s hostility towards transgenderism. Deranged lone gunmen have been ubiquitous in high profile American political assassinations at least since the days of John F. Kennedy.
However, I’d noted at the time that Kirk’s extremely professional assassination seemed a rather impressive achievement for an agitated 22-year-old pro-tranny activist whose grandmother claimed may have never previously fired a gun.
The following week I’d published another long article on the assassination with one of its sections entitled “Tyler Robinson as Skilled Assassin or Hapless Patsy” and in it I explored some of the many anomalies in the case:
According to the official narrative, the killer took his rifle with him to the rooftop perch that was his firing point, then brought it back down as he escaped, afterward abandoning it in a nearby wooded area as he fled, where it was later found by the authorities.
Long before his identity was known, the Salt Lake City FBI released a couple of grainy still images of the suspect taken from a security camera, showing him climbing a stairwell. They did so to enlist the help of the public in identifying him, and their Tweet attracted nearly 90 million views, resulting in his subsequent capture.
But I noticed something rather odd. These were apparently the only two photos released, and neither of them showed him holding a rifle. If the authorities had other photos or videos, why would they not have released those as well in order to help the public better identify the suspect? But if these were the only photos available and they showed him without any weapon, why was the FBI so convinced that he was the killer?
The rifle abandoned by the fleeing sniper was soon found and the Wall Street Journal reported that the etchings on the cartridges revealed that the motive for the killing had included Kirk’s alleged hostility towards the transgendered. And sure enough, after Robinson’s capture, we learned that he had been living with his transgendered roommate and lover, thereby confirming that motive for the assassination.
However, it later turned out that none of the statements on the cartridges had actually mentioned anything about transgenderism. So although Robinson might have had such a motive, the authorities could not have possibly known it at the time that they declared it to the public.
Thus, even before identifying the suspect, the government had correctly determined the very unusual motive for his crime, doing so on the basis of evidence that actually turned out not to exist. So we must either accept that our FBI investigators possess powers of extrasensory perception or that much of the case against Robinson has been concocted, choose whichever you prefer.
Moreover, as Anglin had emphasized in an article sharply criticizing Kirk, the TPUSA leader had long been one of the conservatives most sympathetic to transgenderism. Indeed, he had publicly declared that men could choose to become women and vice-versa, while also heavily promoting a transgendered Trump supporter called “Lady MAGA.”
Although transgendered individuals suffering from severe mental illness have committed mass-shooting rampages, as far as I can recall not a single one of them had ever plotted a deliberate assassination, nor am I aware of any such high-profile killing motivated by the victim’s opposition to gay rights. So it would seem odd indeed if the first and only example of such an American assassination had mistakenly targeted one of the conservative leaders who was most sympathetic to those particular causes.
According to media reports, Robinson was a 22-year-old electrical apprentice who had dropped out of college after just a few months, someone heavily involved in Internet gaming culture, but with no record of political activity or having ever even voted in an election. He had absolutely no history of violence and according to his grandmother had never owned a gun nor may have ever even fired one. While it’s certainly possible that such an individual might wake up one morning and go out to singlehandedly commit the most professional political assassination in modern American history, it hardly seems the most likely possibility…
Most recently, Internet investigators have noted that there does not appear to be any exit wound, indicating that the fatal bullet lodged in Kirk’s throat. However, they emphasized that rounds fired by the alleged murder weapon, a .30-06 rifle, are far too powerful to have been stopped by the victim’s throat tissue, proving that some other sort of firearm had been used and demolishing the official narrative. Indeed the surgeon who operated on Kirk has described what had happened as “an absolute miracle.” We should always be extremely skeptical when the government narratives of high-profile assassinations require us to accept “absolute miracles.”
- American Pravda: Israel, Charlie Kirk, and the 9/11 Attacks
Tyler Robinson as Skilled Assassin or Hapless Patsy
Ron Unz • The Unz Review • September 23, 2025 • 11,000 Words
One of Kirk’s oldest and closest friends was conservative podcaster Candace Owens, and she began producing a long series of sometimes discursive videos analyzing the evidence and raising huge doubts about the case against Robinson. These quickly accumulated a remarkable 25 million views on YouTube and I found many of her objections quite plausible.
In an hour long interview, Blumenthal discussed some of these same issues and cited Owens’ work.
JFK, Charlie Kirk, and 9/11
Nine months have now passed and as far as I know, none of those glaring discrepancies in the case against Robinson have been successfully addressed. I regularly watch the very respectable academics and national security experts who are frequent guests on Andrew Napolitano’s podcast. In the aftermath of Kirk’s killing, quite a number of them suggested that Israel had probably been responsible, and I doubt that any of them have changed their minds.
As the longtime chief of staff for former Secretary of State Colin Powell, Col. Lawrence Wilkerson had spent decades as a pillar of the government establishment and a participant in the innermost circles of national security matters. In an interview last month, he declared that he was absolutely certain that Israel had killed Charlie Kirk in order to clear the path for the Iran War that it sought from President Trump, and he indicated that the same country had also played a central role in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.
Although Wilkerson’s suggested motive was certainly a plausible one, in the aftermath of Kirk’s killing I had presented a different possibility, perhaps explaining the extreme urgency of Kirk’s elimination. As I wrote:
The most famous date in recent American history is surely September 11th and Kirk was killed on September 10th. But although the immediate proximity of those two dates was probably coincidental, the close connection between those two events may not have been.
We just passed the twenty-fourth anniversary of the 9/11 Attacks, and with nearly a quarter-century having gone by, popular interest has largely faded away, as I’ve sometimes emphasized in my own articles on that historical event. Indeed, I had planned to publish a new piece bemoaning what I expected would be the near total silence in our media when that anniversary came and went.
However, just a few days before the date arrived, I discovered that matters were about to take a very different turn…
I now discovered that Carlson was similarly planning to reignite the public debate over the 9/11 Attacks, preparing to release a five-part documentary series on those 2001 events, with his trailer declaring that everything the government had told us at the time was a complete lie.
Carlson currently ranks as the most powerful figure in today’s fragmented media landscape, and a five hour documentary taking such explosive positions seemed likely to resurrect great public interest in those attacks a generation after they had occurred. The first installment was appropriately scheduled for release on the September 11th anniversary date.
The sudden, shocking assassination of Charlie Kirk on the 10th obviously derailed all of those plans, with Carlson naturally focusing all of his attention on the tragic death of his friend. The first installment of the series was quickly rescheduled for release on the 23rd, and I expect that it will have considerable impact.
But consider the far greater impact if Kirk not been killed.
Kirk was a close friend and ally of Carlson, and he probably would have endorsed and heavily promoted the latter’s 9/11 series to the millions of youthful conservative Americans in his TPUSA orbit, most of whom only dimly remembered those catastrophic attacks if they had even been alive at the time…
Within just a few years, the highly suspicious aspects of the official 9/11 story had inspired the creation of a large and energetic 9/11 Truth movement. But faced with the determined resistance by a bipartisan establishment, it had gradually faded over time, receiving less and less media coverage and with its leading figures eventually departing the scene. That movement had always suffered from the major weakness that the vast majority of its rank-and-file members were clearly situated on the left, so that most mainstream conservatives had always dismissed and ignored it as conspiratorial left-lunacy.
But Tucker Carlson ranks as one of the most influential conservatives in American society as did Charlie Kirk, and if Carlson’s 9/11 revelations had been strongly supported by the latter, the impact on our ideological and political landscape would have been gigantic. Just as Carlson had probably played the central role in reviving public interest in the true facts of the JFK Assassination, with Kirk’s support his series might have done the same with 9/11…
Therefore, Israel and its leadership may have concluded that Kirk needed to be eliminated before Carlson released his 9/11 series, and matters were quickly put into motion. Kirk was killed the day before the series was released, greatly diminishing its potential impact and also providing a massive new media story able to divert popular attention from those half-forgotten events of 2001.
- American Pravda: Israel, Charlie Kirk, and the 9/11 Attacks
September 10th and September 11th
Ron Unz • The Unz Review • September 23, 2025 • 11,000 Words
The assassination of Charlie Kirk closely matched that of President John F. Kennedy and it may have been undertaken to protect the secrets of the 9/11 Attacks, thus binding together three of the most infamous crimes of modern American history.
And after fifty-nine years, the story of the U.S.S. Liberty may become the golden key that unlocks that binding.
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