I don’t know anything about this Ryan Wesley Routh, who was arrested after a shootout with the Secret Service a few hundred yards from where Donald Trump was playing golf, other than that he is a huge supporter of Ukraine in the present war and had attempted to get mercenaries to fight for the blue and yellow.
Routh looks and acts like a schizophrenic. My (limited) experience of people in the grip of a schizophrenic episode is that they believe multiple untrue and contradictory things all at once, and with great intensity.
So the political incoherence of the schizophrenic mind will be utterly incomprehensible to someone in the NYT newsroom. I think they won’t even bother trying to classify his belief system and will just ignore it.
Violent rhetoric has been mainstreamed on the Left for years, which still dominates popular discourse. That’s why the attack on the White House has never gotten the same amount of attention as January 6th, for example. So the NYT might in fact be helping to cultivate Routh’s belief system.
Yes, he strikes me as being out of that schizo- paranoid Cluster A. There's a belief I've long encountered that the paranoid delusional is the most dangerous type of stalker, moreso than the more classic hateful types.
Why hasn’t the CIA complied with federal law and declassified all their Kennedy assassination files? They’ve stalled in this for something like ten years.
Supposedly Trump tried to get them to do that and someone talked him out of that because there were still witnesses who could face retaliation. I'm skeptical, but since it's classified we probably won't know.
They could have had Mafia informants or something named as part of the investigation (which was my working hypothesis). I was assuming the conversation went something like:
"Free the files!"
"OK, but if we unredact this Joe Bellucci who talked to us about the Teamsters in Chicago in 1963 is going to get whacked."
"Oh, all right."
Doesn't mean he acted alone. I'm kind of agnostic on that one but I think all the relevant parties are probably dead.
Based on all the old mafia guys who have YouTube shows these days and all the old stories they share, I don't think anyone is getting murdered for squealing about the JFK hit at this point. In fact I think any such person would be happy for the media attention
It's an interesting point. For all that people love Tom Clancy stories about complicated plots, bureaucratic maneuvering is as much a driver of history as anything else--someone's got to actually run that huge empire, and they've got their own goals like anyone else.
Only thing I'd add is that in Soviet Russia, they could do a lot worse to you than assign you to Lake Baikal.
One of the most famous Roman emperors was a guy named Diocletian, who was little more than a middle manager who maneuvered into the Emperorship through some bureaucratic dealings.
Like many middle mangers, he had this idea of vast organizational reform without thinking about how people behaved. He invented the idea of a Roman Empire with dual emperors (East and West) and duel vice-emperors (East and West), which he hoped would stop the constant civil wars and overthrows. He also devalued the money and also began to impose the first kinds of feudalism. He also wanted to encourage Emperors to retire early so vice-emperors could come into the job without turmoil, so he retired himself.
All of his large-scale reforms failed. His devaluation of money led to rampant inflation. His feudalism was as bad a slavery as Rome had ever seen and poisoned Europe for a thousand years. And his Co-Emperor nonsense quickly fell apart following Diocletian's retirement, as the other three just started vying for power just as before. And when Diocletian tried to come out of retirement to fix things, no one listened to him, and no one cared; he was just a weak old man who'd given up the only power he'd ever gotten and never earned.
A pox on the Deep State and their bureaucratic power-hungry mindset.
While I overall agree with you about middle managers...the Eastern Roman Empire lasted another thousand years after the fall of the West, so was it so bad?
If a foreign intelligence agency had a hand in managing Ryan Routh, it was surely: Ukraine.
Ryan Routh is the kind of character likely to have had contacts with many intelligence agencies. Clearly he was radicalized to be pro-Ukraine in a degree so extreme that it may even approach the levels of the dual-citizen Colonel Vindman; or the dual-citizens associated with AIPAC vis-a-vis their state.
Assuming that Routh had connection to one intelligence agency, which one is it most likely to be?
With a guy like this, it's actually likely he had connections to more than one, maybe some he knew about (and may have cooperated willingly), some he suspected, and others he didn't even know about but which influenced him.
It’s easy for the “good” and enthusiastic to get a hearing when they support the right cause, especially when support is needed. Whatever “connections” he made with with authorities/media were probably shallow, and short-lived once they saw that he was a flake
Perhaps the most interesting thing about Mr. Routh is his utterly demented commitment to the war in Ukraine, which mirrors the American political class and media.
I have a friend who confessed to me if he were 25 years younger he might have gone mercenary in Ukraine. It wasn't about the Ukrainians; it was young man's foolish but fun adventure
Very understandable, particularly with the #literallyPutler narrative around the war. I'm surprised there aren't more American mercs but apparently Russian battle plans don't allow for a lot of small-unit heroics to get written up in the media.
The Syrian war attracted similar guys. Rather famously, two Los Angeles gangbangers went to fight for Assad. There's a video of them throwing gang signs and giving shout outs to their LA gang crew while firing machine guns at Syrian rebels. I guess they saw the war as an efficient way to get combat experience.
It suggests once again that as long as you are crazy in the same way people in power are crazy, you don't attract law enforcement scrutiny. The bit about him portraying himself as a mover and shaker who was going to get Afghans to fight for Ukraine: clearly nutty. But combining the kinds of nuttiness that are regime-approved (Afghans are grateful to the West and of course will be easily recruitable to their next regime-change adventure, anywhere on earth: they'll see the justice of the cause for sure for sure!)
The conspiracy theory that the KGB was behind the Kennedy assasination never made sense from a geopolitical standpoint. Khrushchev dominated Kennedy, whose missteps in the Bay of Pigs, Vienna, and Berlin were quite helpful to the Soviet Union, Thus, the incentive to take the risk of killing Kennedy was low to non-existent.
The Castro conspiracy angle makes more sense because of the Kennedys' embrace of the Ike Administration's goal of killing him. However, it's doubtful Castro had the resources to pull it off without the help of the KGB, which had no incentive to assist him.
One of the most entertaining conspiracy theories on the Kennedy assassination is one that relatively few people know about. It's in one of Charles McCarry's excellent series of ten novels about the fictional American spy, Paul Christopher. The title of the novel is "The Tears of Autumn." It was published in 1974 and is the second book in the series. It's well worth a read.
Then there's the Bankster conspiracy: Kennedy was planning to have the Treasury issue silver certificates threatening the Federal Reserve's legal tender monopoly. I'd love for that to be the one.
I disagree. Unlike Eisenhower, JFK was very belligerent with Communist powers. The Bay of Pigs, the Berlin Air Lift, Vietnam, and the Cuban Missile Crisis all showed JFK to be a hothead and openly aggressive with communist regimes. This in contrast to Eisenhower, who despite numerous moments of crisis was never openly threatening communists with attack. JFK was very quick to yell loud and swing at the communists' noses.
This makes sense given JFK's background. As was long forgotten (i.e. buried), JFK was Joseph McCarthy's #1 ally in the Senate during the Red Hunt. While privately a party boy, JFK kept to his Catholic beliefs about the evils of communism. He and Richard Nixon shared a hatred for them, which was one of their common causes.
All this was alarming to the Deep State and the KGB. JFK had brought his nation to the brink of war several times with communists in a way that Eisenhower never did. Communists in America hated him. So the Cambridge 5-of-the-CIA and their KGB buddies both benefited from JFK dead so Johnson--a lifelong political hack and corrupt pol---could be installed to stop all this nonsense about actually stopping communism from spreading and instead just get some proxy war graft going.
Killing JFK was in both the Deep State's and the KGB's interests.
"he Bay of Pigs, the Berlin Air Lift, Vietnam, and the Cuban Missile Crisis all showed JFK to be a hothead and openly aggressive with communist regimes."
The Bay of Pigs was being planned at the end of the Eisenhower administration. The Berlin Airlift was during Truman's reign. Vietnam was already a focus during Eisenhower, and continued to escalate after he was assassinated. And no President would have tolerated Cuban nuclear deployments. Eisenhower was working with Kennedy during the crisis, and Kennedy had to fend off lunatic generals who wanted to start WW3 right away.
Sorry, I should have said Berlin Wall, not the airlift. "Ich bin ein Berliner" was not a message of conciliation, it was identifying Americans with Berlin as a threat.
As to the group: Eisenhower did not openly confront communist hostility, and courted a much more genteel image of the situation. The U2 disaster was handled adroitly by him, and his VP even got to have a public debate on TV with a Khrushchev in a friendly format (the Kitchen Debate).
Meanwhile, JFK's style was publicly rough, despite the Kennedy glow the media gave him. Witness RFK's open hostility to organized crime figures he was opposing. He didn't stuff things in his back pocket or seek to quiet open public hostilities. Communists were not used to such treatment in public.
About that attempted Walker assassination: Oswald missed an illuminated, stationary target at less than 100 feet. Then, using the same rifle, he performed considerably better at Dealey Plaza.
He was probably trying to use the scope when he shot at Walker. There's some evidence that he used the iron sights when he fired at the President's limo.
He had basic grunt training which at the time would be iron sights. Zeroing a scope requires some pretty meticulous work which could easily have frustrated a bugman like Oswald with low-end equipment. So then you're an adrenaline-soaked assassin suddenly remembering how he couldn't really get that scope quite zeroed on the range defaulting to the factory-set iron sights the Marines drilled him on (and they do it very well). Quite plausible.
He was also somewhat poor, & extremely frugal. Not a lot of range trips, perhaps none. Very interesting idea that he used the scope when he shot at Walker. I don’t know enough to evaluate the claim that his mis-aligned scope allowed a leading of Kennedy which adjusted for the moving target.
All I know is, if people use your middle name when referring to you, you are probably going to do something messed up. If your middle name is "Wayne" you never had a chance. I had a friend in college whose middle name was "Wayne". He hasn't done anything yet, as far as I know, but give it time
You are conflating cause and effect; people don't start to refer to you by your middle name until you do something messed up. I'm sure that Oswald was just known as Lee through November 21, 1963.
I never understood why John Hinckley wasn’t generally middle-named. Maybe it’s because his attempt on the president failed, but so did Sarah Jane Moore’s attempt. Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme , another failure, doesn’t count, as Squeaky is a nickname
CI chief and taskmaster to Allen Dulles, James Jesus Angleton, had been keeping track of Lee Harvey Oswald since Oswald's placement in ONI's false defector program in 1959. When Oswald returned to the USA from Minsk with his Russian wife in 1962, Angleton's surveillance off Oswald became 24/7. The anti-Communist Russian network in Dallas which befriended Oswald and Marina had connections to Angleton. Otto Skorzeny's organization in Madrid was hired to do the shooter stuff whilst Meyer Lansky provided Jack Ruby to eliminate the patsy. If one wants to peer into the post war shadow history of the American Empire Angleton is good entry point.
Good stuff, Steve. The Warren Report made sense from the start to finish.
> The Warren Report made sense from the start to finish.
Huh? Missing [sarc] tag?
> The Warren Report made sense from the start to finish.
Huh? Missing [sarc] tag?
Routh looks and acts like a schizophrenic. My (limited) experience of people in the grip of a schizophrenic episode is that they believe multiple untrue and contradictory things all at once, and with great intensity.
So the political incoherence of the schizophrenic mind will be utterly incomprehensible to someone in the NYT newsroom. I think they won’t even bother trying to classify his belief system and will just ignore it.
Violent rhetoric has been mainstreamed on the Left for years, which still dominates popular discourse. That’s why the attack on the White House has never gotten the same amount of attention as January 6th, for example. So the NYT might in fact be helping to cultivate Routh’s belief system.
Big tell: funky hair dye.
For me it’s the eyebrows
"believe multiple untrue and contradictory things all at once, and with great intensity."
The Dementia Party claiming to be democratic?
Yes, he strikes me as being out of that schizo- paranoid Cluster A. There's a belief I've long encountered that the paranoid delusional is the most dangerous type of stalker, moreso than the more classic hateful types.
Why hasn’t the CIA complied with federal law and declassified all their Kennedy assassination files? They’ve stalled in this for something like ten years.
Supposedly Trump tried to get them to do that and someone talked him out of that because there were still witnesses who could face retaliation. I'm skeptical, but since it's classified we probably won't know.
If there have ever been at any time witnesses who could face retaliation, then it wasn’t Oswald acting alone.
They could have had Mafia informants or something named as part of the investigation (which was my working hypothesis). I was assuming the conversation went something like:
"Free the files!"
"OK, but if we unredact this Joe Bellucci who talked to us about the Teamsters in Chicago in 1963 is going to get whacked."
"Oh, all right."
Doesn't mean he acted alone. I'm kind of agnostic on that one but I think all the relevant parties are probably dead.
Based on all the old mafia guys who have YouTube shows these days and all the old stories they share, I don't think anyone is getting murdered for squealing about the JFK hit at this point. In fact I think any such person would be happy for the media attention
It wasn't the Mafia.
I personally suspect it was that the FBI was trying to use Oswald to spy on radical groups, while he was at the same time trying to "kill fascists".
There must be a still open investigation. A suspect must still be alive.
It's an interesting point. For all that people love Tom Clancy stories about complicated plots, bureaucratic maneuvering is as much a driver of history as anything else--someone's got to actually run that huge empire, and they've got their own goals like anyone else.
Only thing I'd add is that in Soviet Russia, they could do a lot worse to you than assign you to Lake Baikal.
One of the most famous Roman emperors was a guy named Diocletian, who was little more than a middle manager who maneuvered into the Emperorship through some bureaucratic dealings.
Like many middle mangers, he had this idea of vast organizational reform without thinking about how people behaved. He invented the idea of a Roman Empire with dual emperors (East and West) and duel vice-emperors (East and West), which he hoped would stop the constant civil wars and overthrows. He also devalued the money and also began to impose the first kinds of feudalism. He also wanted to encourage Emperors to retire early so vice-emperors could come into the job without turmoil, so he retired himself.
All of his large-scale reforms failed. His devaluation of money led to rampant inflation. His feudalism was as bad a slavery as Rome had ever seen and poisoned Europe for a thousand years. And his Co-Emperor nonsense quickly fell apart following Diocletian's retirement, as the other three just started vying for power just as before. And when Diocletian tried to come out of retirement to fix things, no one listened to him, and no one cared; he was just a weak old man who'd given up the only power he'd ever gotten and never earned.
A pox on the Deep State and their bureaucratic power-hungry mindset.
While I overall agree with you about middle managers...the Eastern Roman Empire lasted another thousand years after the fall of the West, so was it so bad?
If a foreign intelligence agency had a hand in managing Ryan Routh, it was surely: Ukraine.
Ryan Routh is the kind of character likely to have had contacts with many intelligence agencies. Clearly he was radicalized to be pro-Ukraine in a degree so extreme that it may even approach the levels of the dual-citizen Colonel Vindman; or the dual-citizens associated with AIPAC vis-a-vis their state.
I doubt the Ukraine had any more use for Routh than the Soviets had for Oswald (no, I don’t believe they put him up to shooting Kennedy)
Assuming that Routh had connection to one intelligence agency, which one is it most likely to be?
With a guy like this, it's actually likely he had connections to more than one, maybe some he knew about (and may have cooperated willingly), some he suspected, and others he didn't even know about but which influenced him.
It’s easy for the “good” and enthusiastic to get a hearing when they support the right cause, especially when support is needed. Whatever “connections” he made with with authorities/media were probably shallow, and short-lived once they saw that he was a flake
Off the top of my head, it was probably the file that Yuri Nosenko created, because that’s exactly what he told the CIA when he defected.
I’ll look at what Bugliosi’s “Reclaiming History” may have had to say. That is a mighty tome.
Yeah, it's also garbage.
Go with anything by Jim DiEugenio. There's also the very good book "Harvey and Lee."
Also, to confirm you didn’t make it up out of the whole cloth, it was on Nightline in 1991.
https://tvnews.vanderbilt.edu/broadcasts/646897
And lo!
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Y7Dou0rgC48
Perhaps the most interesting thing about Mr. Routh is his utterly demented commitment to the war in Ukraine, which mirrors the American political class and media.
Did he care about Ukraine before 2022?
He wanted to bring back Cold War animosity to Russia, just like mainstream Democrats
I have a friend who confessed to me if he were 25 years younger he might have gone mercenary in Ukraine. It wasn't about the Ukrainians; it was young man's foolish but fun adventure
Very understandable, particularly with the #literallyPutler narrative around the war. I'm surprised there aren't more American mercs but apparently Russian battle plans don't allow for a lot of small-unit heroics to get written up in the media.
The Syrian war attracted similar guys. Rather famously, two Los Angeles gangbangers went to fight for Assad. There's a video of them throwing gang signs and giving shout outs to their LA gang crew while firing machine guns at Syrian rebels. I guess they saw the war as an efficient way to get combat experience.
https://www.reddit.com/r/CombatFootage/comments/bfpd8q/los_angelesarea_gangsters_fighting_for_assad_in/
I imagine mowing down Sunni rabble is more fun than duking it out with stone cold Russian grunts.
Plenty of young Westerners have done so, but Rouse is no fool but an old fool
It suggests once again that as long as you are crazy in the same way people in power are crazy, you don't attract law enforcement scrutiny. The bit about him portraying himself as a mover and shaker who was going to get Afghans to fight for Ukraine: clearly nutty. But combining the kinds of nuttiness that are regime-approved (Afghans are grateful to the West and of course will be easily recruitable to their next regime-change adventure, anywhere on earth: they'll see the justice of the cause for sure for sure!)
The conspiracy theory that the KGB was behind the Kennedy assasination never made sense from a geopolitical standpoint. Khrushchev dominated Kennedy, whose missteps in the Bay of Pigs, Vienna, and Berlin were quite helpful to the Soviet Union, Thus, the incentive to take the risk of killing Kennedy was low to non-existent.
The Castro conspiracy angle makes more sense because of the Kennedys' embrace of the Ike Administration's goal of killing him. However, it's doubtful Castro had the resources to pull it off without the help of the KGB, which had no incentive to assist him.
One of the most entertaining conspiracy theories on the Kennedy assassination is one that relatively few people know about. It's in one of Charles McCarry's excellent series of ten novels about the fictional American spy, Paul Christopher. The title of the novel is "The Tears of Autumn." It was published in 1974 and is the second book in the series. It's well worth a read.
Then there's the Bankster conspiracy: Kennedy was planning to have the Treasury issue silver certificates threatening the Federal Reserve's legal tender monopoly. I'd love for that to be the one.
Ok, now you're just projecting your political position onto Kennedy.
FACT
https://heritech.com/pridger/lincoln/xo11110.htm#:~:text=Kennedy%27s%20order%20gave%20the%20Treasury%20the%20power%20%22to,the%20government%20could%20introduce%20new%20money%20into%20circulation.
I disagree. Unlike Eisenhower, JFK was very belligerent with Communist powers. The Bay of Pigs, the Berlin Air Lift, Vietnam, and the Cuban Missile Crisis all showed JFK to be a hothead and openly aggressive with communist regimes. This in contrast to Eisenhower, who despite numerous moments of crisis was never openly threatening communists with attack. JFK was very quick to yell loud and swing at the communists' noses.
This makes sense given JFK's background. As was long forgotten (i.e. buried), JFK was Joseph McCarthy's #1 ally in the Senate during the Red Hunt. While privately a party boy, JFK kept to his Catholic beliefs about the evils of communism. He and Richard Nixon shared a hatred for them, which was one of their common causes.
All this was alarming to the Deep State and the KGB. JFK had brought his nation to the brink of war several times with communists in a way that Eisenhower never did. Communists in America hated him. So the Cambridge 5-of-the-CIA and their KGB buddies both benefited from JFK dead so Johnson--a lifelong political hack and corrupt pol---could be installed to stop all this nonsense about actually stopping communism from spreading and instead just get some proxy war graft going.
Killing JFK was in both the Deep State's and the KGB's interests.
"he Bay of Pigs, the Berlin Air Lift, Vietnam, and the Cuban Missile Crisis all showed JFK to be a hothead and openly aggressive with communist regimes."
The Bay of Pigs was being planned at the end of the Eisenhower administration. The Berlin Airlift was during Truman's reign. Vietnam was already a focus during Eisenhower, and continued to escalate after he was assassinated. And no President would have tolerated Cuban nuclear deployments. Eisenhower was working with Kennedy during the crisis, and Kennedy had to fend off lunatic generals who wanted to start WW3 right away.
Sorry, I should have said Berlin Wall, not the airlift. "Ich bin ein Berliner" was not a message of conciliation, it was identifying Americans with Berlin as a threat.
As to the group: Eisenhower did not openly confront communist hostility, and courted a much more genteel image of the situation. The U2 disaster was handled adroitly by him, and his VP even got to have a public debate on TV with a Khrushchev in a friendly format (the Kitchen Debate).
Meanwhile, JFK's style was publicly rough, despite the Kennedy glow the media gave him. Witness RFK's open hostility to organized crime figures he was opposing. He didn't stuff things in his back pocket or seek to quiet open public hostilities. Communists were not used to such treatment in public.
About that attempted Walker assassination: Oswald missed an illuminated, stationary target at less than 100 feet. Then, using the same rifle, he performed considerably better at Dealey Plaza.
He was probably trying to use the scope when he shot at Walker. There's some evidence that he used the iron sights when he fired at the President's limo.
He had basic grunt training which at the time would be iron sights. Zeroing a scope requires some pretty meticulous work which could easily have frustrated a bugman like Oswald with low-end equipment. So then you're an adrenaline-soaked assassin suddenly remembering how he couldn't really get that scope quite zeroed on the range defaulting to the factory-set iron sights the Marines drilled him on (and they do it very well). Quite plausible.
Iron sights require zeroing as well. Was the scope on his rifle on a see-through mount?
You know, I think it really was a side mounted optic.
https://image.invaluable.com/housePhotos/universityarchives/91/742191/H19845-L320470232.jpg
You just made me get up and go see if my cheap Rossi 22 plinker has adjustable sights and it does. So presumably the cheap mail order Carcano did too.
He was also somewhat poor, & extremely frugal. Not a lot of range trips, perhaps none. Very interesting idea that he used the scope when he shot at Walker. I don’t know enough to evaluate the claim that his mis-aligned scope allowed a leading of Kennedy which adjusted for the moving target.
As Margaret Thatcher said, 'It's a funny old world.'
Pity no one had cell phone cameras back then.
All I know is, if people use your middle name when referring to you, you are probably going to do something messed up. If your middle name is "Wayne" you never had a chance. I had a friend in college whose middle name was "Wayne". He hasn't done anything yet, as far as I know, but give it time
You are conflating cause and effect; people don't start to refer to you by your middle name until you do something messed up. I'm sure that Oswald was just known as Lee through November 21, 1963.
So when you do something wrong the press middle names you like when you really piss your mom off?
Kinda. It’s also so media outlets don’t get sued by Lee Thomas Oswald, or John Percival Gacy
Oh, I've still got my eye on John Percival Gacy; no way he's clean with that name
A wise precaution
I never understood why John Hinckley wasn’t generally middle-named. Maybe it’s because his attempt on the president failed, but so did Sarah Jane Moore’s attempt. Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme , another failure, doesn’t count, as Squeaky is a nickname
maybe they thought Jr was better.
Good point. I forgot he was junior
Read a book called "Dr Mary's Monkey". There's another whole dimension to the JFK story that involved the development of bioweapons.
CI chief and taskmaster to Allen Dulles, James Jesus Angleton, had been keeping track of Lee Harvey Oswald since Oswald's placement in ONI's false defector program in 1959. When Oswald returned to the USA from Minsk with his Russian wife in 1962, Angleton's surveillance off Oswald became 24/7. The anti-Communist Russian network in Dallas which befriended Oswald and Marina had connections to Angleton. Otto Skorzeny's organization in Madrid was hired to do the shooter stuff whilst Meyer Lansky provided Jack Ruby to eliminate the patsy. If one wants to peer into the post war shadow history of the American Empire Angleton is good entry point.