It's our birthday! Well, technically, it's not until this Saturday, but given everything going on in the world, we think we deserve a pass for celebrating early. And considering the monumental occasion, we decided it is time for some R&R. This week, we shut off our lamps, hang up our hard hats, and take some time to reflect on the past year, the present moment, and what’s to come. 

Since our very first episode, our view has been that it is high time that we wise up and realize that there is a complete disconnect between the purported ideals of the United States and the reality of the actions taken by the American government, namely the horrific history of enslavement, exploitation, and the series of successive genocides.  It is now, more than ever, difficult to square the American ideals of truth, justice, and equality with the American actions of slavery, genocide, and forced migration. In this episode, we take it back to the basics and reflect on what this project means to us and what we consider its core values.  As a result, we think this episode is another good one to help new listeners dip their toes in our project.  Because we walk through the foundational pillars, new listeners will leave with a capsule course on what Fourth Reich Archaeology is all about. 

And what it is all about is friendship. As we say many times in this episode, this project is powered by friendship–the friendship shared between Dick and Don, but equally important is the friendship we've forged with all of you who tune in week after week. In this next year, we hope to deepen those bonds. We really don't want this to be a one-way street. We want to hear what is on your mind. To that end, we are excited to launch the Fourth Reich Archaeology Hotline. To access the number, sign up on our Patreon. We look forward to hearing from you.

We are thrilled to be back with our friend from across the pond, researcher Max Arvo, for another installment of our excavation into the man who killed Lee Oswald, Jack Ruby. It's another split episode that you can find in all its 2+ hour glory on Patreon, or wait until Side B comes up here in the future.

We start off by recapping and taking stock of our speculative findings thus far, from the motivating force behind Jack's desperate spate of phone calls to old mob pals, to whether and how he was brought into a larger conspiracy, to what was going through his mind as he took the fatal shot and surrendered his body to his friends on the Dallas Police Department.

Then we pick up with our factual narrative where we left off in Part 3, including a deep rumination on the spectacular implications of this being the first-ever murder caught on live TV. To really drive the point home, we have condensed some of the best tidbits of ABC News's live coverage of the events of November 24, 1963 in one of our best Fourth Reich Archaeology mashups yet. Remember, that Sunday, Americans were glued to their TV sets to watch the president's casket carted from the White House to the Capitol, and Ruby's killing of Oswald interrupted the broadcast.

Side B will cover the formation of Jack's legal and psychiatric team. Again, you can access the full episode today at patreon.com/fourthreicharchaeology. Otherwise you will have to wait.

As a reminder, Max's series of articles on Ruby can be found here: https://www.kennedysandking.com/john-f-kennedy-articles/jack-ruby-a-review-and-reassessment-part-1

We are back with another installment of the Big Con(gress)—our ongoing exploration of that putrid cesspool on the Potomac, the United States Congress.  In this episode we turn our focus back to the ongoing genocide in Palestine in the wake of yet another visit to Washington by notorious international war criminal, mass murderer, and genocidaire extraordinaire, Benjamin Netanyahu. With us again is Andrew Myslik, a former congressional staffer and our man in Washington.

We are now well into the second year of the Palestinian genocide. The utter lack of humanity that the members of Congress have shown to the Palestinian people is despicable. Rather than call for Netanyahu’s arrest and condemn Israel’s war crimes, which to be clear is absolutely warranted under international law, both the Trump administration and the vast bulk of both parties in Congress have, once again, rolled out the red carpet for the man. Join us as we look into not only why that is but also how this blind loyalty has played out over the last 20 months. We start with the obvious—the Israel lobby is moving a lot of money and effectively steering the ship when it comes to US political discourse about the Middle East. But we also dig deeper, and discuss the many different forms of moral and mental gymnastics that US Politicians must engage in to justify their acceptance of Israeli blood money. 

This one gets a little spicy, so we’ve decided to only release part of the episode on the free feed.  Head on over to Patreon.com/fourthreicharchaeology and subscribe to listen to the whole thing.

As promised, this is the second half of our play-by-play of Jack Ruby's manic wild ride leading up to his murder of Lee Harvey Oswald on live TV on November 24, 1963. We pick up right where we left off, deep into the night of November 22, with Ruby taking his roommate ("boyfriend"?), George Senator, and his employee-cum-tenant, Curtis Laverne "Larry" Cravard, on a quest to collect evidence of what he perceived to be an antisemitic false flag attempt to blame the Jews for Kennedy's assassination.

We trace Jack's bizarre activities over the subsequent 32 hours leading up to the fatal moment at 11:21 AM on Sunday morning in the basement of the Dallas Police building. We get into some light speculation over what really happened, and what was going on in Jack's drug-addled, sleep-deprived, and desperate mind in the most decisive day and a half of his short life.

Remember, if you want to hear the full 2+ hour Part 3 in its entirety, head on over to Patron.com/fourthreicharchaeology and sign up.

We will be back soon with Max Arvo to cover the somehow-even-stranger events of the final years in Ruby's life, including his "treatment" by a team of spooked-up psychiatrists helmed by none other than Louis Jolyon "Jolly" West himself.

Friends, ‘Muricans, Countrymen. Or, for that matter, anyone lucky or unlucky enough to find themselves in the grips of the American Empire. We hope you enjoy this departure from our ongoing series (plural) to take stock of American independence on this anniversary of American “independence” (Luca Brasi voice). Dick and Don offer asynchronous reflections on the meaning and continuing viability of the so-called American Experiment as it descends into a place as dark as the one Frederick Douglass excoriated over 150 years ago.

We also feature Douglass’s words, and those of one of his intellectual successors, Kwame Turé aka Stokely Carmichael, to hammer home the point that there can be no progress without the organization of the masses of the people, and only that organization can bring about Justice. Progress isn’t progressive at all if it isn’t built on a foundation of Justice, premised in turn upon a reckoning with the crimes of history. And that reckoning is precisely what we are trying to bring forth here on Fourth Reich Archaeology.

We are back with Part 3 of our deep dive into the life and times of Jack Ruby. Recall that in Part 1, we focused on Ruby’s early years in Chicago’s southwest side during America’s  Prohibition era. Ruby’s rough and tumble upbringing put him in the mix with kids who grew up to be well-connected guys in some of the most powerful and notorious mob families of the 20th Century.  We discussed how Ruby’s ties to the mob influenced his eventual move to Dallas and his decision to set up clubs in the city. 

In Part 2, we put Chicago in the broader context of postwar America and traced the mob’s westward and southerly expansion from hubs in Chicago and New York to towns like Las Vegas and Dallas. We further fleshed out the connections between Ruby and the mafia and set the scene for the tragic events of November 1963. 

In this episode, we jump into the action and focus on the timeline of events immediately leading up to the killing of Lee Harvey Oswald. At the time Ruby was, to say the least, a little stressed.  He had a massive debt with the IRS and faced serious problems with local unions and competitors in Dallas. But in the days leading up to JFK’s assassination, Ruby made a flurry of calls to his mob pals, some of whom he hadn’t spoken to in years. On November 17, he traveled to Las Vegas to see Lewis McWillie–a man with ties to Meyer Lansky and Santos Trafficante. When he returned from that trip, Ruby told his tax attorney that a “friend” (whom Ruby never identified) would cover his tax debts. Perhaps a sign of relief, Ruby spent the night of November 21st out on the town, dining at the famed Dallas restaurant, Campisi’s.  

That brings us to November 22, 1963. When news of the assassination broke, Ruby closed his clubs and spent the day roving around town.  He famously visited both Parkland Hospital (where Kennedy’s body was taken) and the Dallas police station (where Oswald was being held).  In proper Jack Ruby form, he made a splash wherever he went. He cried on journalist Seth Kantor’s shoulder while at Parkland. He corrected another journalist during a presser at the Dallas police station. For two days and nights, Ruby roamed the streets of Dallas and wound himself up. And on the morning of November 24, he let himself loose on Lee Harvey Oswald.

This one is another two-parter, with Side A available for free this week and Side B coming to you next week. But if you can't wait for next week, you can hear the entire episode (Sides A & B) right now by subscribing to our Patreon. So head on over to patreon.com/fourthreicharchaeology and make a donation to listen to the whole thing today!

Author and critic Malcolm Harris joins Don for a forward-looking, optimistic discussion on communism, the possibilities for leftist organizing in our fascist hellscape (including concrete steps YOU can take to contribute to the struggle), the buildup to war in Iran, and much more. If you’re not already familiar with Malcolm’s work, you should be. He is the author of four books including 2023’s Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World, and this year’s What’s Left: Three Paths Through the Planetary Crisis. He has also emerged as a leading critic of the “Abundance” rebranding of neoliberal technocracy, publishing a thoughtful review at the Baffler (https://thebaffler.com/latest/whats-the-matter-with-abundance-harris). 

In What’s Left, Malcolm proposes that the left must pursue a variety of strategic approaches to confronting the climate crisis and the root causes of extractive capitalism and militarism that have fueled the fires burning our world. We discuss how we might make these strategies “fit together like puzzle pieces” in harmony, with the goal of ecological survival and planetary justice, as well as some of the biggest obstacles in the way. We hope you enjoy, and that we’ll have a chance to catch up with Malcolm down the line to check in on how things go from here.

As a treat, a never-heard original song from Don (aka Angleton’s Orchids) for the outro.

Meanwhile, you can get Malcolm’s books at your local bookstore or library, follow him on Twitter @BigMeanInternet, on Tik Tok @MalcolmHarrisClips, or on the scene in Philadelphia - check philacal.com for events!

Follow us on Twitter & Insta @fourthreichpod, email [email protected], and sign up for our Patreon if you’re willing and able at patreon.com/fourthreicharchaeology. 

NO WAR WITH IRAN! END THE GENOCIDE NOW!!

We are back with another installment of our excavation into the U.S. Congress with guest Andrew Myslik, who worked for Rep. Rashida Tlaib as a staffer for her first 7 years in office. Our anchor point for discussion is Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill.”

Without getting too in the weeds, we cover what’s in it, who wins and who loses. Spoiler alert: the winners, as always, are the ruling class. Billionaires, multinationals, military-industrial-tech-surveillance-infotainment-industrial complex. The losers are everybody else, especially the poor and marginalized. We hear from Andrew about how the game is rigged against democracy, how corporate interests take ownership and exercise control over the so-called people’s representatives.

We consider how the simultaneous loss of legitimacy by the fascist state and worsening of conditions for Americans - especially Black and Brown people - is leading to a new Amerikan Apartheid. Just one piece of a larger movement for global Apartheid bearing down on us from the “civilized” Western world. Many of our rulers want that, and we’re all but powerless to stop them through the traditionally conceived “democratic” channels. So what then?

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Welcome back for Part 2 of our excavation into Jack Ruby with Max Arvo! In Part 1, we dug up the surface layer of Ruby’s biography and followed his life trajectory from Chicago’s Southwest side (b. 1911) to Dallas’s club scene in the early 60s. In this episode, rather than going broader, we go deeper. This episode is really about adding some much-needed nuance to the often simplistic picture of American Organized Crime, and how it fits into the nexus between the business and intelligence networks that fueled the rise of the postwar American Empire.

We put the City of Chicago in the broader context of postwar America and trace the mob’s westward and southerly expansion from hubs in Chicago and New York. We also examine some of Ruby’s oldest and closest friends from the school of hard knocks - guys like Lenny Patrick, Dave and Sam Yaras, and the hulking Barney Baker. These were street toughs who grew up alongside the Rubenstein kids in the ghetto gauntlet of Capone’s town, and they’d serendipitously pop back up in Jack Ruby’s life in Fall 1963. We also take roll call on Jack’s other bosom pals he met along the way from Chicago to Dallas and beyond - brainier guys like Paul Roland Jones and Lewis McWillie.

All of these characters have direct lines to mob royalty: whether it’s Patrick & Yaras’s wet work for Sam Giancana, Baker’s muscle work for Jimmy Hoffa, or McWillie’s work running casinos for Meyer Lansky. They constituted a layer between the higher-ups in the Cosa Nostra and disposable dummies like Ruby.

We do our best to really flesh out these connections and go beyond the corkboard, so that we (and you, listener!) can really understand just how “the men who put [Jack Ruby] in the position [he was] in” did so. With this episode the stage is set to pick back up next time in 1963 and go deep on the factual narrative of the Oswald hit. Enjoy!

Sign up for our Patreon here: Patreon.com/fourthreicharchaeology.

Read Max’s investigative series on Ruby here: https://www.kennedysandking.com/content/author/415-maxarvo.

And find Max’s other work here: https://maxarvo.com.

The Warren Commission Decided Series is back with another installment of our ongoing series within a series within a series on Jack Ruby. The great Max Arvo joins us in the excavation once again. 

Max is a writer, researcher, musician, poet, and more, and you can find all of his work at his website here: https://maxarvo.com. We all have Max to thank for one of the most substantial original contributions to JFK research in a generation - namely, the degree to which CIA psychiatrist and MKULTRA heavyweight Louis Jolyon West became involved in the “treatment” and handling of Jack Ruby. Max has been in the Jolly West archives, he has stared into the abyss, and he has agreed to guide us like Dante’s Virgil through the hellscape of Jack Ruby’s life. 

His series of articles is brilliant; they’re all available for free, and you really should read them here: https://www.kennedysandking.com/content/author/415-maxarvo.

In Side B of Part 1, we pick up where we left off, laying the foundation for this epic excavation into the Ruby mines. We begin with another excerpt from Jack’s Warren Commission testimony as it keeps getting weirder and weirder. Then, we follow Jack from his unremarkable service as a mechanic stateside in WWII, to his riding a southerly wave of mafia migration to Dallas, to his neurotic struggle to stay afloat in Dallas’s club scene. Most people don't know that Ruby played host to music legends like The Band, Hank Williams, and more, besides just strippers. And we end off with his “Cuban exploits" of the late 50s bringing him smack-dab in the middle of the CIA-Mafia war on Castro. You will not want to miss it.

Hear the whole Part 1 by signing up for our Patreon here: Patreon.com/fourthreicharchaeology.