November 2023: Texas Monthly is still spewing an Astronomical Amount of Lone Nutter Garbage on the JFK assassination

Texas Monthly for decades has spewed an astronomical amount of Lone Nutter Garbage on the JFK Assassination

Robert Morrow: I am a native of Tuscaloosa, AL, but I lived in Austin, TX from 1988-1990 while I was getting an MBA at the University of Texas at Austin. I moved back to Austin, TX in December, 1994 and I have lived here ever since. I have lived in Austin for the better of the past 35 years (as of October, 2023).

          I have been a student of the JFK assassination since March of 2008. I was reading a discussion board post on the website Education Forum and within a mere 15 minutes I had seen enough information to convince me that Lyndon Johnson was behind the JFK assassination. In the years since my entry into JFK assassination research I have compiled a vast amount of evidence that, yes, Lyndon Johnson in a conspiracy with Texas power brokers (Ed Clark, D.H. Byrd) used elements of military intelligence (Gen. Edward Lansdale) and the CIA to murder JFK. It is very likely that some CIA-connected anti-Castro Cubans were also involved in the murder of JFK.

          I have also for years been a "not-so-avid reader" of Texas Monthly magazine and I have read many of their articles in their archives that relate to both Lyndon Johnson and, separately, the JFK assassination. Texas Monthly, since it’s inception in 1973, has written an astronomical amount of garbage on the JFK assassination, as it continues to traffick in one of the greatest lies in world history. This “greatest lie” is that a lone nut named Lee Harvey Oswald killed JFK and it is hardly an exaggeration to state that every editor and every writer at Texas Monthly has adhered to this ridiculous party line for 50 years. These people are “journalists” and “writers” and sometimes they are “professors” at a college and they, like almost all “journalists” at Texas newspapers and TV stations are lockstep in their arrogant ignorance that a lone nut killed JFK. It is a big fat lie and it is such a self-serving and convenient lie for the elite of Texas, most of whom hated the guts of John Kennedy back in 1963. Their children and grandchildren still have money, influence and power in Texas which is a big reason the lie is forever perpetuated.

         The one thing these journalist shills never bring up, except to laughably dismiss the thought, is that LYNDON JOHNSON was up to his sick, bloody eyeballs in the JFK assassination. The politically-controlled professors of history and politics at Texas universities and colleges have also adopted this mantra: a lone nut killed JFK and no way was LBJ involved in murdering John Kennedy.

          Currently, Texas Monthly’s “man on the case” of the JFK assassination is Sean O’Neal. I don’t know much about this man except that he does not know his ass from a hole in the wall when it comes to the JFK assassination. Sean’s gig can be summarized as “I used to be a nutty, paranoid JFK assassination conspiracy theorist but I now know that JFK was murdered by a lone gunman named Oswald. Sean O’Neal is not conversant on the JFK assassination just as almost ALL of Texas Monthly writers on the topic of the JFK assassination are similarly lacking. From my experience they do not even want to discuss the topic. They disseminate their propaganda on this topic then move onto the next item with no Q&A session or any attempt to debate the topic. They would never sit down for a cup of coffee and discuss the JFK assassination with anyone who actually knows something about it.

        Texas Monthly is that the editors there have long been groupies of Lyndon Johnson and in some cases, they are friends with the Johnson family (as is the case of longtime Texas Monthly editor Evan Smith who used to chummily refer to Lady Bird Johnson as “Mrs. J.” You can always count on Texas Monthly and its writers to present the LBJ family (whose patriarch was the most evil person in American history) in the sweetest, most favorable terms.

        In Texas all of the universities, colleges and media outlets are awful on the JFK assassination. The three worst (as defined as hardcore lone nutter) media platforms for JFK assassination truth are, in addition to Texas Monthly, the Dallas Morning News (whose elite were involved in murdering JFK) and WFFA, a home TV station for Dallas.

        From my point of view, the cover up operation relating to both Lyndon Johnson, personally, and the JFK assassination broadly is quite disgusting. There is quite a mountain of evidence that implicates LBJ in the JFK assassination and even more that proves the JFK assassination was a high level, Texas-based conspiracy to murder JFK. The other thing that is so sad to watch in Texas media and academia is the perpetual slandering, defaming and lying about Lee Harvey Oswald, a completely innocent pre-selected CIA patsy for the JFK assassination. These people have a nasty side hobby of throwing hot oil on Marguerite Oswald, saying she was so nutty and unhinged that there is no wonder Oswald killed JFK.

          The same people who murdered JFK were the exact same people who murdered Oswald and they used Jack Ruby as the tool to do it. Jack Ruby was yet another one who implicated Lyndon Johnson in the JFK assassination.

         Below is Sean O’Neal’s 60^th anniversary of the JFK assassination for Texas Monthly. I have added some annotations in blue italic. A summary of Sean O’Neal’s pathetic approach to the JFK assassination is that you are an ignorant, paranoid kook if you think LBJ or a high-level domestic conspiracy murdered JFK.

The Endless Assassination of John F. Kennedy

By Sean O’Neal for Texas Monthly, November 2023

“After his murder in Dallas, our perception of what happened has been shaped by the pop culture – and subculture – it inspired”

https://www.texasmonthly.com/arts-entertainment/the-endless-assassination-of-john-f-kennedy/

I’m on the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository, a ring of corrugated boxes stacked so tightly around me I can practically breathe in their cardboard musk. Three more boxes sit at my knees, propped against a window overlooking Dallas’s Dealey Plaza, frozen beneath a cloudless sky. I peer down through the trees lining Elm Street. I think about the trajectory a bullet might take from here. 

I lean forward, disturbing the cat sleeping in my lap here inside my Austin home. She stirs, then begins rubbing against the virtual reality headset I’m wearing. The Dallas skyline trembles. 

This scene (minus the cat) is part of JFK: Memento, an “immersive” documentary set to debut this November at Dallas’s the Sixth Floor Museum. Through stereoscopic wizardry, visitors can experience the chaos that unfolded there on November 22, 1963, when President John F. Kennedy was killed. They’ll stand with spectators as Kennedy’s motorcade passes and sit in the so-called sniper’s perch, where the Warren Commission concluded that a disgruntled loner named Lee Harvey Oswald had changed the course of American history. In JFK: Memento, you see it all—except Kennedy’s murder. Those details remain obscured, impossible to divine no matter how close you get.

[RM- Of course there was a shooter in the “sniper’s window” on the Sixth Floor of the Texas School Book Depository – and there was very likely a another sniper in the far western window on that floor. There is so much evidence that the head kill shot to JFK came from the Grassy Knoll – the Zapruder Film and witness testimony proves this. Why is this so hard for decades of morons at Texas Monthly to understand? Here is why: these journalists are politically controlled slaves of the Texas power elite who are hostile to truth in the JFK assassination.]

JFK: Memento is just the latest software update to a morbid fascination

[RM- what is so “morbid” about an extremely important piece of American history? Do you even refer to “morbid fascination” about the Vietnam War or WWII? Some people find these topics interesting. Necrophilia could be described as morbid.] that’s thrived for sixty years. November 22 has been parsed across more than one thousand books; its secrets have inspired countless political thrillers and reams of internet punditry. The grief it evokes has been immortalized in TV melodramas and maudlin folk songs. The sheer volume of assassination-tainment we’ve amassed speaks not only to the tragedy’s historical importance or to the urge to solve its mysteries. As this expansion into virtual reality illustrates, we keep returning to the Kennedy assassination because, over time, we’ve made this story about ourselves.

[RM – This is the kind of defecation that pours out of the asses of Texas Monthly writers whenever they are called upon to address the JFK assassination. Meaningless, totally incorrect gibberish.]

When the Sixth Floor Museum opened, in 1989, it was geared toward “what the museum calls ‘the rememberers,’ ” its executive director, Nicola Longford, says, those with firsthand accounts of when Kennedy was assassinated. JFK: Memento, however, is aimed at a generation whose familiarity with the events are based on what sociologists call a collective memory—a pool of images and feelings passed down through the generations. This collective memory has largely been shaped by pop culture, into what the cultural-history professor Alison Landsberg terms a “prosthetic memory.” Most of the estimated 350,000 people who visit the Sixth Floor Museum annually know the Kennedy assassination this way. 

Collective memories are inherently biased, and they change over time. Our impression of the Kennedy assassination—formed in grief, then tainted by everything that followed—is an ever-evolving Rorschach test. Any chance we had at closure died with Oswald. The skepticism that greeted the Warren Commission report was compounded over a decade of turbulence, [RM- from 1964 to 1966 there was almost no public  “skepticism” about the Warren Report. Mark Lane’s book, published in the fall of 1966, blew a hole in the Warren Report fantasy and a majority of Americans have never believed it since.] as America’s idealism was further tested by the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr., by the furors over Vietnam and Watergate, by the revelations that the CIA had behaved like a gang of extralegal thugs. By the seventies most Americans no longer trusted the government. Even today a slight majority still doesn’t buy that Oswald acted alone.

The collective memory of the Kennedy assassination is one of anger and suspicion. Our prosthetic memory, fashioned from media depictions that keep November 22, 1963, playing on a constant, Kodachrome-vibrant loop, has only calcified that unease. This cynicism has, in turn, shaped how we see ourselves. The art the assassination inspired nurtured a culture of mistrust whose influence has grown only more mainstream. Today the details—who killed Kennedy and why—are almost beside the point.

[RM- That is one of the most stupid things I have ever read in my entire life. No wonder you are completely non-conversant on the JFK. Who killed JFK and why was killed is the most important thing to be understand. Everything else – including your essay here – is sideline chickenshit.] The story has a life of its own. And we can’t seem to stop telling it.

If we’ve spent much of the past sixty years viewing the Kennedy assassination through any particular window, it’s the one into Oliver Stone’s mind. In 1991 the postmodernist provocateur came to Dallas to make JFK, a film that is part political thriller, part nervous breakdown, and surely the most influential version of the story since the Warren Commission’s. JFK’s success—it raked in more than $200 million and eight Oscar nominations—rankled those who abhorred its frenetic blend of fact and fabrication. Yet its impact as a “countermyth,” to quote Stone, remains undeniable. As Roger Ebert, one of JFK’s many champions, wrote, “This is not a film about the facts of the assassination, but about the feelings.” 

Those feelings had been percolating even before Kennedy assumed office, in the film noirs born of post–World War II disillusionment, and in Cold War thrillers such as 1962’s The Manchurian Candidate. After Kennedy’s death, American cinema turned even more self-loathing. Vietnam-era movies, such as 1967’s Bonnie and Clyde and 1969’s The Wild Bunch, replaced white-hat cowboys with amoral antiheroes waging nihilistic violence. Watergate seeped into Chinatown and The Parallax View, both from 1974, and 1981’s Blow Out, films that teemed with systemic rot and shadowy cabals. [RM – How can you forget to mention the movie Executive Action which came out in 1973?The movie is an allegory of the JFK assassination and Mark Lane wrote that script and the story of that movie is in itself a very important story.] Robert Altman’s Nashville (1975) and Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (1976) captured a country in spiritual crisis, both films culminating in assassinations carried out by golems conjured from our fractured national psyche.

[RM- You want know who was the biggest golem in American history? Lyndon Fucking Johnson: the man who murdered JFK (1963), Henry Marshall (1961), Sam Smithwick (1952), millions of Vietnamese, USS Liberty sailors (1967). Abusive LBJ also treated his wife Lady Bird and staff like pure garbage and there was no singularly more politically corrupt person in American history. LBJ had deep mental instabilities and can be rightly classified as “nuttier than a shit house rat.” Lyndon Johnson raked in the equivalent of hundreds of millions from his government service.]

Stone’s JFK drew upon all of these, adding a Capraesque righteousness that rallied baby boomers still in mourning. It also validated teenagers, like me, who suspected that everything was rigged—that, as Don DeLillo wrote in Libra, his 1988 assassination fantasia, “There is a world inside the world.” JFK made me a burgeoning assassination buff, a hobby I fed by devouring conspiracy books and the paranoid entertainment, like The X-Files, it inspired. 

[RM- O’Neal is describing JFK assassination researchers and specialists as “paranoid.” This has been a favorite line of the bipartisan criminal elite establishment for decades.]

For a kid—or anyone—grappling with a world beyond their control, conspiracy theories can be soothing. James Pennebaker, professor emeritus of psychology at the University of Texas at Austin and a pioneer in the field of writing therapy, likens them to journal entries for trauma victims. “When we’re dealing with something that’s unresolved, our minds automatically try to resolve it,” he says. 

[RM- “Soothing?” It sounds like if you believed in a world beyond control with awful conspiracies everywhere you would be anything but soothed. I am not soothed by the coverup of the JFK assassination – I am mad as hell about it!]

Pennebaker is no fan of Stone’s film: “A shameful rewriting of history,” he says. “I’m appalled by that movie.” Still, he understands why JFK resonated with anyone who needed to assign meaning to chaos. “It constructed a conspiracy theory that was really digestible, that gets into this collective memory of ‘the government cannot be trusted,’ ” Pennebaker says.

[RM- Only a moron would trust any government anywhere: endless examples confirm this. The JFK assassination cover up is a prime example of this. Btw Professor Pennebaker for many years was on the government payroll as a professor at the University of Texas.]

More than scapegoats, JFK offered the seductive illusion that by uncovering the “truth,” we could right the wrongs of history. We’d suffered under this delusion since at least 1964, when Dallas’s self-proclaimed “schlockmeister” Larry Buchanan, director of Z-grade fare including Mars Needs Women, dreamed up The Trial of Lee Harvey Oswald. Since then, we’ve pinned Kennedy’s death on comic book supervillains, such as Red Skull and Magneto, or on The X-Files’ Cigarette Smoking Man, or leaped through time to rescue him, in an episode of The Twilight Zone and in novels such as Stephen King’s 11/22/63. 

[RM- I have gone to JFK assassination conferences for 15 years and not one speaker or attendee there has pinned the JFK assassination on a comic book super villain. Now maybe that was Sean O’Neal’s view on the JFK assassination at one time, but no one I know thinks that. Most people I know think LBJ or the CIA killed JFK. A few think Carlos Marcello did the crime.]

These fictions reflect our surprisingly resilient grief, if not for Kennedy specifically then for some part of ourselves that believes we can still be the heroes. As the Washington Post’s Ann Hornaday pointed out, Stone’s JFK arrived the same year as the World Wide Web, a convergence that would essentially gamify the assassination, giving newly minted conspiracy hobbyists such as me endless rabbit holes to tumble down. 

[RM- The internet certainly has some garbage in it, but just look at the astronomical amount of lying ABC, NBC, CBS, NY Times, Wash Post and the rest of the MSM fed to you decades ago when there was no other outlet to fact check or contradict their horseshit on so many topics.]

The assassination was even adapted into video games—not just as a subplot in titles such as Call of Duty: Black Ops but, in 2004’s JFK Reloaded, where, as a first-person shooter, you could try your hand at killing Kennedy. Carrie Andersen, who studied JFK assassination–related games while completing her PhD at UT–Austin, understands that most people’s reaction to something like JFK Reloaded would be “rightfully, dismay and disgust.” Nevertheless, she says, the mere act of challenging an official narrative—even through a video game—can give us a rare agency over history. “The morbidity of seeing the Kennedy assassination in a video game, I don’t think that’s going away anytime soon,” Andersen says. “But there is something powerful about being able to put yourself in a historical figure’s shoes.”

I’m on the sixth floor of the old Texas School Book Depository again, only this time I’m physically here. Ten feet away lies the sniper’s perch, walled off behind plexiglass, stacked with replica cardboard boxes. (The real ones were hauled off by the FBI.) The window is a copy too, the original having been removed by one of the building’s previous owners. Running along the wall facing Elm Street are touch screens playing a CGI reimagining of Kennedy’s motorcade. The president’s face is reduced to a featureless, Lego-like blob. 

[RM- Sean O’Neal why is it so hard for you and Texas Monthly to mention that D.H. Byrd, the owner of the Texas School Book Depository was an oil man and military contractor who was close personal friends with the #1 Kennedy-hater in the world, Lyndon Johnson, and that D.H. Byrd and fellow investor James Ling (also an LBJ pal) made heavy insider stock buys into their defense contractor LTV in the weeks before the JFK assassination? Additionally, LBJ gave LTV a special contract to build planes in January, 1964 and it was paid for out of the non-existent 1965 budget. Peter Dale Scott proved all of this in an unpublished manuscript called the Dallas Conspiracy in 1970. Either O’Neal does not know that or thinks this critically important information is not material to an essay on the JFK assassination. D.H. Byrd was the man who removed the sniper’s window and displayed it as a trophy in his massive Dallas home along with the many trophy animals he killed.]

I’ve paid a dozen visits to the Sixth Floor Museum, and each time I’m struck anew by how it feels less like a place where history happened and more like a movie set. Part of that, of course, is because everything from JFK and 2013’s Parkland to Erykah Badu’s “Window Seat” video was filmed right outside. But some of its uncanniness is because the museum, too, is another representation. It relies on photos, re-creations, and (soon) virtual realities. One of its main attractions is a model of Dealey Plaza used by the Warren Commission, a replica of the very building you’re standing in. Even up close, Kennedy’s assassination seems distantly artificial, a simulacrum wrapped in plastic.

[RM-The model you are referring to was created by the FBI – and it shows all the shots to JFK coming from behind (and not the Grassy Knoll where JFK’s head kill shot came from). The FBI in 1963 was run by J. Edgar Hoover, a very close personal friend of Lyndon Johnson. Both Hoover’s and LBJ’s jobs were directly threatened by the Kennedys and Hoover was key to the cover up of the JFK assassination. In return LBJ exempted Hoover from mandatory federal retirement at the age of 70, which Hoover turned on 1/1/1965]

That clinical remove is by design. After all, a lot of people in Dallas didn’t want this museum. In 1988, a year before it opened, James Pennebaker coauthored a study that revealed how rates of murder, suicide, and heart disease had spiked among Dallasites in the year after the assassination. Local luminaries including Tom Landry and Mary Kay Ash called for the School Book Depository to be leveled. Arsonists tried, twice. Dallas’s collective memory was one of shame. Twenty-five years later, Pennebaker had found that 79 percent of Dallas natives still believed the world held them responsible. 

[RM- Here is the precise reason Texas Monthly and the Dallas Morning News and Dallas’s WFAA TV station are so hardcore in their lone nutter fantasies: Lyndon Johnson and his elite business cronies in Dallas WERE IN FACT involved in murdering JFK and covering it up. This is quite a scar on the LBJ legacy crowd, Dallas in particular and Texas in general. This certainly includes the Dallas Police Dept. which was under the thumb of the rich people who ran Dallas.]

The Sixth Floor Museum remains hypersensitive about reopening those wounds: “We’ve been criticized for being too careful,” Longford says. But while the museum remains tastefully above the fray, the street below tells a different story. [RM- Sixth Floor Museum executive director Nicola Longford is hard core lone nutter and everything she does pushes that. Curator Stephen Fagin is in my view a closet “conspiracy theorist” but he toes the company line to keep his job.]

More recently Dealey Plaza has been invaded by increasingly outlandish groups. Dozens of QAnon conspiracists gathered here in 2021 to await the resurrection of Kennedy’s also-long-dead son, John F. Kennedy Jr.—and maybe even President Kennedy himself—whom they believed would return to help Donald Trump take back the White House. Our deep state paranoia has become so quaintly old hat, apparently, that today’s conspiracy theorists are asking not who killed Kennedy but whether he was killed at all. 

[RM- The Q-Anon people can’t be any more stupid than the Lone Nutters that O’Neal and Texas Monthly carries the water for. The vast majority of JFK assassination researchers I know think Q-Anon is a pile of horseshit but they do think LBJ and/or the CIA murdered JFK.]

Dallas was able to purge its guilt over the Kennedy assassination. Oliver Stone absolved it, shifting the blame onto more vast and nebulous forces. What remains is a free-floating, ambient paranoia that colors everything—from 9/11 to COVID-19, from the January 6 insurrection to last month’s school board meeting.

[RM- Sean O’Neal, Texas Monthly and Oliver Stone all have something in common: none of them understands the JFK assassination. Oliver Stone went to Vietnam and so he thinks the JFK assassination was about putting the USA into the Vietnam War. The weight of the evidence says this was not the case: the Kennedy War on Lyndon Johnson was the root cause and #1 reason for the JFK assassination!]

By the assassination’s seventieth anniversary, there will be even fewer who remember it—who know it beyond inherited feelings and experienced it other than virtually. But this fractured-mirror world it has created as its most lasting legacy will have become all too real. That story’s only just begun.