During the runup to Nov. 5, there was a lot of talk about “vibes.” This was a vibes election more about what people felt than about what they think (or think they know). Jonathan V. Last has a Bulwark post about how out of synch people perceptions are with reality. It’s rather instructive. First, the results of a YouGov poll on how people perceive what percentage of the population various groups constitute:
The results were hilarious. Here are some of the percentages that Americans (on average) think their fellow citizens are:
Transgender: 21 percent
Muslim: 27 percent
Jewish: 30 percent
Black: 41 percent
Live in New York City: 30 percent
Gay or lesbian: 30 percent
We’ll get to the actual, in vivo percentages in a moment. First I want to point out the absurdity: 1-in-3 are gay/lesbian? Muslims and Jews make up 57 percent of the country? Blacks are 40 percent of the population?
We are talking about errors of perception measured by orders of magnitude. On the trans population, the average American’s estimation is off by 2,000 percent.
People make a consistent mistake in the same direction, Last observes. They wildly overestimate the number of people from recognized minority/interest groups of every kind and underestimate how numerically common their own group is. He dubs it “a particularly American cognitive bias.”
I wonder how much it has to do with the evangelical perception that there’s a secret war going on just below the surface of observable reality that Christians wage daily against spiritual principalities and powers, “against the rulers of the darkness of this age, against spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places.” They learn that the Devil and his demons lurk around every corner waitin’ to git ya.
These perceptions are conclusions drawn from little or no actual encounters in real life with trans people, gay people, Muslims, etc. Yet people assume these Others are everywhere.
Like imaginary Satanic pedophile cults that way. It’s this learned paranoia that perhaps says something fundamental about Americans’ psyche, long haunted by paranoid fantasies, whether it’s savages in the woods or commies in woodpiles.
This distorted perception leads people in majorities to a combative, oppositional politics. They worry about being displaced by minorities they rarely encounter but fear are lurking somewhere, out there, in great masses.
Richard Hofstadter wrote about the paranoid style in American politics in 1964 and he was looking at both the contemporary and the historical. Developments since then have mostly confirmed his thesis. I think we can take it as read that paranoia is an important component of American social and political life.
And if this is the case, then I would say that our bizarre perception bias is both symptom and cause. People are paranoid about The Other, which is why they believe that hordes of The Other must exist. And the belief that their own majority group is small while The Other is large feeds the underlying paranoia.
“I’m not sure how democracy is supposed to work with a population that is this paranoid, confused, and oblivious to reality,” Last concludes.
I’m not sure either. But this misperception of threats that the poll reveals is nothing new. I noticed that decades ago after the Three Mile Island accident when nuclear power was more on people’s threat radar:
I have a 1982 Scientific American article here (Xeroxed. Remember kids?) in which study subjects were asked to rank a sampling of 30 sources of risk. Nuclear power topped the list for the League of Women Voters and college students, although it ranked 20 in terms of attributable deaths. Business professionals ranked nuclear power No. 8. Pesticides also made the top ten for the League and college students. It showed up at 28 on the researchers’ list. At the bottom of list of risks for all three groups? Vaccinations. Where would they rank today? We’re not very good at this.
The dangers from vaccinations may leapfrog ionizing radiation as a perceived risk after Jan. 20. Getting them or not getting them.
California has at many points been held up as an American paradise. Now it’s widely seen as closer to hell. Runaway housing prices, tax burdens, homelessness, congestion, fire, drought, flood. The best sides of tech innovation, and the worst of tech-bro greed and narcissism. These are the state’s hallmarks. This perception is particularly rampant among Republicans: Polls show that two-thirds of Republicans say this one US state has done more damage than good for the country, and that almost half of them don’t consider it “American” at all. Beyond political party, fully half of adult Americans say in polls that California is in decline. As a recent headline put it shortly before Harris became the Democratic nominee, “California’s image will be a weapon” against her as a candidate.
Never mind that one in every eight Americans still lives in California—a population larger than 21 other US states combined—and that its economic output is bigger than any entire non-US country except China, Japan, or Germany, and that it’s the birthplace of an disproportionate share of the world’s most familiar and valuable brand names. The overwhelming sense is that the California miracle is over, its reservoirs of dynamism as tapped out as the Central Valley’s aquifers during recent years of drought.
As a Californian who has spent most of his life in other parts of the United States, and as an American who has lived for more than a dozen years in other parts of the world, I’ve often been struck by the ways declinist alarmism about my home state can feel like a displaced version of declinist alarmism about my home country as a whole.
“California is America, but sooner,” the USC sociologist Manual Pastor has said. That goes for huge cultural and demographic shifts (California was the first mainland US state whose diverse population became “majority-minority,” back in the 1990s, a full generation ago) and for era-defining crises, self-inflicted and not. And most importantly, it also goes for solutions—the kind that can redirect the momentum of American life, and life around the world, with a leverage no other state possesses.
Just take the area of gasoline-powered transportation. After World War II, when American car culture was famously getting minted in Southern California, the state used a gas tax hike to build out one of the first modern freeway networks. In the ’50s, the US federal government borrowed that same model to construct the interstate highway system. Then, starting in the 1980s, California led the fight against leaded gasoline, eventually banning its sale in 1992, four years before the US as a whole did the same. In 2019, after Donald Trump’s administration rolled back emissions standards for cars, California struck a deal with the world’s leading carmakers, from Ford to Honda to VW and BMW—to make existing standards even tougher in the face of climate change. The size of the California market made this a de facto national standard (which the Biden administration later ratified).
It would be one thing if this were just a history lesson. But the same kind of dynamic is playing out right now in a few crucial arenas that virtually no one beyond California is talking about. And I’m happy to report that the America taking shape on its Pacific coast is again inventing solutions far more rapidly than conventional wisdom has accounted for.
[…]
California deserves new attention as the “reinvention state” rather than a “resistance state.” Even under Trump, there’s still a good chance that as California goes, so eventually goes the country, and eventually much of the world. Here are a few illustrations of where it’s headed. None of these is “the” solution to California’s many problems. But each of them illustrates the creative spirit from which solutions have always come.
I urge you to read the whole thing while it’s still beyond the paywall. It’s really good and should provide at least a modicum of hope that despite the destruction Trump is about to unleash there is another vision.
It’s not that California doesn’t have problems. It has all the problems everyone else has and often shows the new problems before the rest of the country. It’s spawned the era of the tech bro libertarians that has become a blight on all of us. But because of its massive population, resources, wealth and talent, it also often shows the path out of it.
I live here and I didn’t know the half of it. It’s reassuring. If we can get through this perilous period without an unrecov erable catastrophe, there is hope.
Fallows concludes:
The story of America involves continued rediscovery of its potential. That is the story of the most American state as well. “I’d give anything to trade for America’s problems,” a senior Chinese bureaucrat told me in 2008, when I was living in Beijing and the United States seemed to be in free fall. America had emergencies; China, he explained, had more threatening long-term weaknesses—as has become clear in the years since then. As I write, America’s immediate political prospects are uncertain. But however this year’s election turns out—with a president who was born in California, or with a California girding itself to show that it still represents the future—the state demands attention for its many innovations, and not just its travails.
In case you were wondering why all these people involved in sexual assault are being chosen for the Trump administration, this is why. And it is why those fucked up, incel bros voted for him:
He “tells it like it is” — that they were asking for it. And he’s right that for millenia some men have told themselves that.
Now read the Pete Hegseth police report. Listen to Matt Gaetz defend himself. It’s all a version of the same thing. When you’re a star you can get away with it. And Trump and his miserable, garbage cabinet and staff are proving it.
Timothy Snyder lays out the case against Pete Hegseth. It’s worse than you think:
1. Pete Hegseth, Trump’s nominee for secretary of defense, has no qualifications for the job. He has never run a large organization and has no national security expertise.
2. Hegseth has zero notion of which other countries might threaten America or how. In his books this is simply not a subject, beyond a few clichés.
3. Hegseth does not believe in alliances. For him, “NATO is a great example of dumb globalism.”
4. Hegseth wants a political army that bans women from combat roles, is purged of “cowardly generals,” and is anti-woke.
5. Hegseth never notes that the politicized Russian army meets all of his standards perfectly, but is is ineffective and commits war crimes.
6. Hegseth never notes that the Ukrainian army, which does have women in combat, and is not politicized in the way he would like, has overperformed.
7. Hegseth has almost nothing to say about the most significant armed conflict of our time and has not visited Ukraine or learned anything about it.
8. Hegseth’s misogynist gender politics are consistent with his polygamy and the accusations of rape.
9. Hegseth’s enemies are all internal: the Left, Muslims, and immigrants. He repeatedly claims that the Left wishes to annihilate everyone else, which is a call to violence.
10. Hegseth, a Christian Reconstructionist, believes that Americans should be governed not by law or by the Constitution but by God — as interpreted of course by Hegseth and his friends.
11. Hegseth calls for a “holy war” and a “crusade” against Americans who think differently than he does because “God wills it.” Trump is the pretext: Hegseth wants “to make crusade great again.”
12. Hegseth, according to his books, could be counted upon to ignore threats to America from abroad, and to use a purged and politicized military against “enemies within.” This is consistent with Trump’s avowed intention to build a kind of dictatorship on the ruins of a dysfunctional government.
13. Hegseth thus represents a policy of regime change. Trump’s nomination of Hegseth is best understood as part of a decapitation strike against the republic. A Christian Reconstructionist war on Americans led from the Department of Defense is likely to break the United States.
People like Hegseth who have half-baked ideas based upon superficial reading of history are all over the place. Sometimes I am one of them. But people like that should not be put in charge of anything as important as the US Military. The danger lies in the egomania that compels him to accept such a position despite his totally unqualified background and experience. Hegseth is someone who does not believe that war crimes should be crimes. He is a violent sexual assaulter. He is, in other words, a violent man, possibly a sociopath.
I can easily see him and the enablers around him doing some truly terrible things because they are too ignorant of the consequences and have no restraint. People like that often do something destructive simply because they don’t have the imagination or the know-how to do anything different.
Gorka opened the video saying “I knew this day would come, but I didn’t expect it so soon,” crowing about Trump’s order allowing Attorney General Bill Barr to declassify information about the 2016 election.
“The Kraken has been unleashed,” Gorka declared in his signature affected bellow. “Watch, in the next two days, the rats, the hyenas, start to eat each other.”
A large light source appears to be placed behind the camera for Gorka’s monologue, overexposing the video which seems to be inspired by villainous monologues from Arnold Schwarzenegger movies.
Sebastian Gorka, the pugilistic commentator who leveraged fears about Islam as a threat to Western civilization into a short-lived role in the first Trump administration, is poised for a second run inside the White House.
Gorka was tapped to serve as deputy assistant to the president and senior director for counterterrorism, president-elect Donald Trump said Friday night. Previously, Gorka was an adviser on national security matters for Trump for seven months until his abrupt exit.
The role, which doesn’t require Senate confirmation, will position Gorka to provide counsel and input on issues he has focused on for years, including hard-line approaches on militant groups and immigration. But if his previous role at the Trump administration is any indication, he is poised to ruffle feathers even among reverent Trump loyalists and other Republicans, who have described him as fringe and underqualified, more suited to riff in cable news green rooms than guide policy in the Oval Office.
Ya think??? Here’s another primer on his background. (Spoiler alert: He’s just as nutty as RFK Jr and a great deal more openly bloodthirsty.) Not that anyone with a brain would need to see anything other than that insane video to know he shouldn’t be allowed within a hundred miles of the White House.
He was pushed out in the first term and couldn’t get a security clearance. Trump is bypassing all security clearances in this term so he’s back, largely, I would assume, because of that video not in spite of it. That kind of loyalty will not go unrewarded. I’m just surprised Sidney Powell and Michael Flynn haven’t been tapped. Yet.
That one time I tuned into Bannon's War Room and heard America's next counterterrorism chief Sebastian Gorka articulate outright Christian fascism.
This is a good first clue that Trump has no intention of even pretending to follow the law this time. And why should he? He knows he has immunity:
President-elect Donald J. Trump is keeping secret the names of the donors who are funding his transition effort, a break from tradition that could make it impossible to see what interest groups, businesses or wealthy people are helping launch his second term.
Mr. Trump has so far declined to sign an agreement with the Biden administration that imposes strict limits on that fund-raising in exchange for up to $7.2 million in federal funds earmarked for the transition. By dodging the agreement, Mr. Trump can raise unlimited amounts of money from unknown donors to pay for the staff, travel and office space involved in preparing to take over the government.
Mr. Trump is the first president-elect to sidestep the restrictions, provoking alarm among ethics experts.
Those seeking to curry favor with the incoming administration now have the opportunity to donate directly to the winning candidate without their names or potential conflicts ever entering the public sphere. And unlike with campaign contributions, foreign nationals are allowed to donate to the transition.
Trump can also keep any unspent money that’s collected. Sweet.
This is way beyond the “appearance of conflict of interest” it’s the blatant appearance of corruption and considering Trump’s history, it’s almost certainly exactly that. Between the Truth Social and Bitcoin scams where people can “invest” in his money losing schemes for the purpose of currying favor, the second Trump administration is going to be a free-for-all. He will literally be running his cons right out of the oval office and no one will say a word because they are terrified he’s going to exercise his immunity and pardon power to destroy them.
That sounds hyperbolic I know. But ask yourself, “who’s going to stop him,?”
Is this a funciton of people turning off the news? If so, maybe we should turn it back on…
Mandate? Looks like it …
46% not motivated? That’s a bad sign:
Maybe people are just tired. I’ll refrain from freaking out for a while on that one. But I’m worried that he’s so fully normalized that most people won’t react at all to what he does:
Will this matter or will everyone ust move on to the next thing?
Pay no attention to the partisanship when you analyze whether or not “economic anxiety” is the explanation for election outcomes, especially GOP partisanship. Obviously, that’s completely meaningless.
The Cabinet:
Note that more than half the people think they should be loyal to Trump. Slowly but surely it’s happening…
Only a little over 50% approve of Trump’s tariffs. But this is just depressing although earlier polls showed this so we shouldn’t be surprised:
I guess we should be happy that more don’t support using the military — for now.
Trump will have a honeymoon it appears. And if Project 2025 is any gyude, and it should be, they are planning to take full advantage of it.
Can we stop parroting that we can’t normalize Donald Trump? Or autocracy, kleptocracy, oligarchy, etc.? Look around.
Anyone who says, “Well, that’s never going to happen,” to warnings that some batshit insane event might happen under the coming Trump administration has not been paying attention over the last decade. “Well, that’s never going to happen” keeps happening.
A brief review (in no particular order):
Americans elected Donald Trump, a reality TV star with no political experience, a man with a reputation in his hometown as a con man, a repeat adulterer and sexual predator, to be president of the United States. Backed by Bible-believing, evangelical Christians.
After Trump’s dark, “American carnage” inauguration speech, former president George W. Bush remarked, “That was some weird shit.”
The world watched Trump reject the consensus view of the U.S. intelligence community and take Russian autocrat Vladimir Putin’s word that Russia had not interfered with the 2016 election. In front of the world’s press. After meeting the former KGB officer in private with no advisers or note-takers.
An American president ordered immigrations officials to separate migrant parents and children, losing track of the children and/or locking them in cages.
The same president attempted to withhold appropriated weapons from an American ally fighting off a Russian invasion unless Ukraine launched (or at least announced) an investigation into a political rival, former Vice President Joe Biden, and his son, Hunter. He was impeached (but not convicted) for it.
The world watched the United Nations General Assembly laugh at the president of the United States.
At a NATO summit, Trump was caught on camera “shoving aside Montenegro’s Prime Minister Dusko Markovic in what appeared to be an attempt to get to the front of the photo line.”
Trump dismissed the COVID-19 plague that had already killed hundreds of Americans as going away on its own by Easter 2020, then promoted quack remedies as tens of thousands more died.
The America president told so many blatant lies that a major newspaper kept count, discontinuing its tally at somewhere over 30,000.
Trump wanted to buy Greenland and talked about nuking hurricanes.
Trump and Republican allies around the country attempted to overturn the results of the 2020 election after Trump lost to Joe Biden.
On Jan. 6, 2021, Trump “summoned the mob, assembled the mob and lit the flame of this attack” on the U.S. Capitol. The mob battled the police for hours, breached and sacked the building, threatening to lynch lawmakers, as Trump sat for hours watching on TV, doing nothing. Several people died. Trump told rioters he loved them. He was impeached but not convicted a second time.
Trump left the White House after stealing hundreds of classified documents. It was just one of the many acts for which he’s been federally indicted, including the Jan. 6 insurrection.
New York juries convicted Trump on 34 felony counts for business fraud and found him guilty of rape in a civil lawsuit.
Trump held a xenophobic, misogynistic rally in Madison Square Garden that echoed the German American Bund rally held there in 1939.
After all of the above and much, muchmore — and yet still more — Americans elected Donald John Trump as president for a second time on Nov. 5, 2024.
Let’s contemplate some of what may come next.
Trump means to staff his administration with anti-democracy, extremist cranks and weirdos.
He will direct the Department of Justice to prosecute and jail his political enemies, and demand military tribunals for generals who crossed him.
He will ethnically cleanse the country of millions of (face it) nonwhite, undocumented residents using perhaps active-duty troops.
Trump hopes to denaturalize others and strip birthright citizenship from U.S.-born children of the undocumented, and the Roberts Supreme Court will let him.
He plans to abandon Ukraine to Russian annexation and precipitate the collapse of NATO.
He plans to wholesale fire dedicated, career civil servants, and staff what’s left of the government with inexperienced, fawning sycophants led by anti-democracy, extremist cranks and weirdos.
Women’s rights will be under more threat than in the past half-century.
Trump’s administration will, in effect, declare open season on the LGBTQ+ community and allow Christian nationalists to impose their beliefs on the nation, including on Christians who find their beliefs abhorrent.
Look, fighting back against what’s coming is not just righteous, but patriotic. I’m tired. You’re tired. We’re all tired. But for all its flaws, the ideal of America that MAGA Republicans want to unmake with extreme prejudice is worth fighting for. I’m sorry I’m not more upbeat about it like James Fallows or Rebecca Solnit. That doesn’t lessen the imperative, especially since there is no guarantee how low the foes of freedom won’t stoop once they get rolling.
Tell me again, “Well, that’s never going to happen.”
Now that campaign season is almost over (our N.C. state Supreme Court recounts, lawsuits, etc., could drag into December), I’ve scheduled my Covid booster and flu shots for later this morning. With quacks and cranks poised to take over the health system on January 20, hoarding your necessary meds is a good idea. As is getting your shots, advises Joyce Vance at Civil Discourse. She got hers on Friday:
Increasingly, I’m contemplating the issues we are going to face at the intersection of public health and the rule of law. Dr. Vin Gupta posted on BlueSky today, “We need as many healthcare professionals to be courageous and speak to truth, for our patient’s sake and for the sanctity and credibility of our profession. That starts now. We cannot allow the highly abnormal to be normalized.” He said it in the context of the qualifications, or lack thereof, of Trump’s nominees for key positions in the health sector, including Marty Makary as FDA commissioner, Dr. Janette Nesheiwat for surgeon general, and Dr. Dave Weldon for CDC director, all of whom would work for Kennedy. Each of them is controversial. And, of course, there’s Mehmet Oz for CMS, which oversees agencies including Medicare and Medicaid.
Gupta is naive. Normalizing the abnormal was pretty much complete after the vote count on Nov. 5. Horse, barn, etc. Not to mention that if you don’t get those immunizations at federal expense now, you may be paying for them out of pocket (if still available) once Dr. Brainworm & Co. move into their new offices.
That is, if they can find their new offices (Raw Story):
Appearing on CNN early Saturday morning, Professor Heath Brown of the John Jay College of Criminal Justice raised alarms that the Trump transition team has yet to submit much-needed documentation to the General Services Administration (GSA) which would allow senior members of the president-elect’s team to have access to information they will need on day one.
Speaking with host Victor Blackwell, Brown was asked, “So this agreement with the General Services Administration allows them to get some office space, get some money but also there are documents related to ethics agreements and anti-conflict of interest commitments. Is this abnormal, disruptive or is it more than that?”
“I think it’s very worrisome for two primary reasons,” Brown replied. “If the agreements aren’t signed that means the key information that the incoming administration needs about the major threats, challenges facing our country are not going to be shared in the same way as if the agreements were signed.”
I-O-K-I-Y-A-R will be S-O-P for M-A-G-A more then ever this time around, starting even before Dictator on Day 1 takes and violates his oath of office in the same breath. Rules established to ensure government transparency and accounatbility are out the window. Not quite half the country voted for abnormal.
Without those signed agreements, Brown worries, we won’t know who is funding this transition.
“Those agreements establish caps on the amount of money that can be donated to the transition team as well as requiring public disclosure of who those donors are,” Brown continued. “If we don’t see those agreements signed, we’ll never know that information and I think many people would worry about that.”
But that’s the point. Donations to the transition become another lucrative grift for Trump. Again, not quite half of “many people” couldn’t care less about that.
Will they when the next Covid variant or the flu strikes down a family member? Doubtful.
“Strength takes many forms, and the most obvious forms are not always the most significant. The men who create power make an indispensable contribution to the Nation’s greatness, but the men who question power make a contribution just as indispensable, especially when that questioning is disinterested, for they determine whether we use power or power uses us. […]
If sometimes our great artists have been the most critical of our society, it is because their sensitivity and their concern for justice, which must motivate any true artist, makes him aware that our Nation falls short of its highest potential. […]
We must never forget that art is not a form of propaganda; it is a form of truth […] But democratic society — in it, the highest duty of the writer, the composer, the artist is to remain true to himself and to let the chips fall where they may. In serving his vision of the truth, the artist best serves his nation.”
– President John F. Kennedy, from his Robert Frost tribute address (October 23, 1963)
61 years ago this past Friday, President John F. Kennedy and First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy landed in Dallas, Texas at 11:38am. They were accompanied by Texas Governor John Connally and his wife. The two couples were greeted by Vice-President Lyndon B. Johnson and Lady Bird Johnson. After about 15 minutes of schmoozing with the friendly crowd of admirers gathered on the tarmac, the Kennedys, Johnsons, and Connallys were whisked to their waiting motorcade, which would take them through downtown Dallas. Thousands of locals already lined the route, eager for a glimpse of the charismatic President and First Lady.
As we are all now painfully aware, President Kennedy had only 35 minutes left to live.
Every time I see that footage of JFK and Jackie getting off the the plane at Love Field, I say to myself "No, no…don't go…get back on the plane…please." Hard to watch any film clip or photograph of that day.
— Dennis Hartley denofcinema.bsky.social (@denofcinema5) November 22, 2024
“Where were you when Kennedy got shot?” has been a meme for anyone old enough to remember what happened that day in Dallas on November 22, 1963.
I was but a wee military brat, attending my second-grade class at a public school in Columbus, Ohio (my dad was stationed at nearby Fort Hayes). Our class was herded into the gym for an all-school assembly. Someone (probably the principal) gave a brief address. It gets fuzzy from there; we either sang “My Country ‘Tis of Thee” or recited the Pledge of Allegiance (or we possibly did both), and were sent home early.
My 7-year-old mind could not grasp the profound sociopolitical impact of this tragedy; naturally I have come to understand it in the fullness of time. From my 2016 review of Jackie:
Understandably, the question of “why now?” could arise, to which I would reply (paraphrasing JFK) …why not? To be sure, Jacqueline Kennedy’s story has been well-covered in a myriad of documentaries and feature films; like The Beatles, there are very few (if any) mysteries about her life and legacy to uncover at this point. And not to mention that horrible, horrible day in Dallas…do we really need to pay $15 just to see the nightmare reenacted for the umpteenth time? (Spoiler alert: the President dies at the end).
I think that “we” do need to see this film, even if we know going in that there was no “happy ever-aftering” in this Camelot. It reminds us of a “brief, shining moment” when all seemed possible, opportunities were limitless, and everything was going to be all right, because Jack was our king and Jackie was our queen. So what if it was all kabuki, as the film implies; merely a dream, invented by “a great, tragic actress” to unite us in our sadness. Then it was a good dream, and I think we’ll find our Camelot again…someday.
They will run you dizzy. They will pile falsehood on top of falsehood, until you can’t tell a lie from the truth – and you won’t even want to. That’s how the powerful keep their power. Don’t you read the papers?
– From Winter Kills (screenplay by William Richert)
The Kennedy assassination precipitated a cottage industry of independent investigations, papers, articles, non-fiction books, novels, documentaries and feature films that riff on myriad conspiracy theories.
Then of course there was that Warren Commission report released in 1964; an 888-page summation concluding JFK’s alleged murderer Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone. This “conclusive” statement, of course only fueled more speculation that our government was not being completely …forthcoming.
2024 marks the 45th anniversary of one of the more oddball conspiracy thrillers based on the JFK assassination…Winter Kills. Director William Richert adapted his screenplay from Richard Condon’s book (Condon also wrote The Manchurian Candidate, which was adapted for the screen twice).
Jeff Bridges stars as the (apolitical) half-brother of an assassinated president. After witnessing the deathbed confession of a man claiming to be a “second gunman”, he reluctantly gets drawn into a new investigation of his brother’s murder nearly 20 years after the matter was allegedly put to rest by the findings of the “Pickering Commission”.
John Huston chews the scenery as Bridges’ father (a larger-than-life character said to be loosely based on Joseph Kennedy Sr.). The cast includes Anthony Perkins, Eli Wallach, Sterling Hayden, Ralph Meeker, Toshiro Mifune, Richard Boone, and Elizabeth Taylor.
The film vacillates between byzantine conspiracy thriller and a broad satire of other byzantine conspiracy thrillers–but is eminently watchable, thanks to an interesting cast and a screenplay that, despite ominous undercurrents, delivers a great deal of dark comedy.
Is Winter Kills essential viewing? It depends. If you like quirky 60s and 70s cinema, it’s one of the last hurrahs in a film cycle of arch, lightly political and broadly satirical all-star psychedelic train wrecks like The Loved One, The President’s Analyst,Skidoo,Candyand The Magic Christian. For “conspiracy-a-go-go” completists, it is a must-see.
Here are 9 more films that either deal directly with or have a notable link with the JFK conspiracy cult. And while you’re watching, keep President Kennedy’s observation in the back of your mind: “In serving his vision of the truth, the artist best serves his nation.”
Suddenly – Lewis Allen’s taut 1954 hostage drama/film noir stars a surprisingly effective Frank Sinatra as John Baron, the cold-blooded leader of a three-man hit team who are hired to assassinate the (unnamed) President during a scheduled whistle-stop at a sleepy California town (interestingly, the role of John Baron was originally offered to Montgomery Clift).
The film is essentially a chamber piece; the assassins commandeer a family’s home that affords them a clear shot at their intended target. In this case, the shooter’s motives are financial, not political (“Don’t give me that politics jazz-it’s not my racket!” Sinatra snarls after he’s accused of being “an enemy agent” by one of his hostages). Richard Sale’s script also drops in a perfunctory nod or two to the then-contemporaneous McCarthy era (one hostage speculates that the hit men are “commies”).
Also in the cast: Sterling Hayden, James Gleason, Nancy Gates, Christopher Dark, and Paul Frees (Frees would later become known as “the man of a thousand voices” for his voice-over work with Disney, Jay Ward Productions, Rankin/Bass and other animation studios).
Some aspects of the film are eerily prescient of President Kennedy’s assassination 9 years later; Sinatra’s character is an ex-military sharpshooter, zeroes down on his target from a high window, and utilizes a rifle of a European make. Most significantly, there have been more than a few claims over the years in JFK conspiracy circles suggesting that Lee Harvey Oswald had watched this film with a keen interest.
There have been conflicting stories over the years whether Sinatra had Suddenly pulled from circulation following Kennedy’s death; the definitive answer may lie in remarks made by Frank Sinatra, Jr., in a commentary track he did for a 2012 Blu-ray reissue of the film:
[Approximately 2 weeks] after the assassination of President Kennedy, a minor network official at ABC television decided he was going to run Suddenly on network television. This, while the people were still grieving and numbed from the horror of the death of President Kennedy. When word of this reached Sinatra, he was absolutely incensed…one of the very few times had I ever seen him that angry. He got off a letter to the head of broadcasting at ABC, telling them that they should be jailed; it was in such bad taste to do that after the death of President Kennedy.
Sinatra, Jr. does not elaborate any further, so I interpret that to mean that Frank, Sr. fired off an angry letter, and the fact that the film remains in circulation to this day would indicate that it was never actually “pulled” (of course, you are free to concoct your own conspiracy theory).
The Manchurian Candidate – There’s certainly more than just a perfunctory nod to Red hysteria in John Frankenheimer’s 1962 cold war paranoia fest, which was the last assassination thriller of note released prior to the zeitgeist-shattering horror of President Kennedy’s murder. Oddly enough, Frank Sinatra was involved in this project as well.
Sinatra plays a Korean War vet who reaches out to help a buddy he served with (Laurence Harvey). Harvey is on the verge of a meltdown, triggered by recurring war nightmares. Sinatra has been suffering the same malady (both men had been held as POWs by the North Koreans). Once it dawns on Sinatra that they both may have been brainwashed during their captivity for very sinister purposes, all hell breaks loose.
In this narrative (based on Richard Condon’s novel) the assassin is posited as an unwitting dupe of a decidedly “un-American” political ideology; a domestic terrorist programmed by his Communist puppet masters to kill on command. Some of the Cold War references have dated; others (as it turns out) are evergreen.
Seven Days in May – This 1964 “conspiracy a-go go” thriller was director John Frankenheimer’s follow-up to The Manchurian Candidate. Picture if you will: a screenplay by Rod Serling, adapted from a novel by Fletcher Knebel and Charles W. Bailey II.
Kirk Douglas plays a Marine colonel who is the adjutant to a hawkish, hard right-leaning general (Burt Lancaster) who heads the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The general is at loggerheads with the dovish President (Fredric March), who is perceived by the general and some of the other joint chiefs as a “weak sister” for his strident support of nuclear disarmament.
When Douglas begins to suspect that an imminent, unusually secretive military “exercise” may in fact portend more sinister intentions, he is torn between his loyalty to the general and his loyalty to the country as to whether he should raise the alarm. Or is he just being paranoid?
An intelligently scripted and well-acted nail-biter, right to the end. Also with Ava Gardner, Edmund O’Brien, and Martin Balsam.
Executive Action – After the events of November 22, 1963, Hollywood took a decade-long hiatus from the genre; it seemed nobody wanted to “go there”. But after Americans had mulled a few years in the sociopolitical turbulence of the mid-to-late 1960s (including the double whammy of losing Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King to bullets in 1968), a new cycle of more cynical and byzantine conspiracy thrillers began to crop up (surely exacerbated by Watergate).
The most significant shift in the meme was to move away from the concept of the assassin as a dupe or an operative of a “foreign” (i.e., “anti-American”) ideology; some films postulated that shadowy cabals of businessmen and/or members of the government were capable of such machinations. The rise of the JFK conspiracy cult (and the cottage industry it created) was probably a factor as well.
One of the earliest examples was this 1973 film, directed by David Miller, and starring Burt Lancaster and Robert Ryan. Dalton Trumbo (famously blacklisted back in the 50s) adapted the screenplay from a story by Donald Freed and Mark Lane.
A speculative thriller about the JFK assassination, it offers a scenario that a consortium comprised of hard right pols, powerful businessmen and disgruntled members of the clandestine community were responsible.
Frankly, the premise is more intriguing than the film (which is flat and talky), but the filmmakers deserve credit for being the first ones to “go there”. The film was a flop at the time, but has become a cult item; as such, it is more of a curio than a classic. Still, it’s worth a watch.
The Parallax View – Alan J. Pakula’s 1974 thriller takes the concept of the dark corporate cabal one step further, positing political assassination as a sustainable capitalist venture, if you can perfect a discreet and reliable algorithm for screening and recruiting the right “employees”.
Warren Beatty delivers an excellent performance as a maverick print journalist investigating a suspicious string of untimely demises that befall witnesses to a U.S. senator’s assassination in a restaurant atop the Space Needle. This puts him on a trail that leads to an enigmatic agency called the Parallax Corporation.
The supporting cast includes Hume Cronyn, William Daniels and Paula Prentiss. Nice work by cinematographer Gordon Willis (aka “the prince of darkness”), who sustains the foreboding, claustrophobic mood of the piece with his masterful use of light and shadow.
The screenplay is by David Giler and Lorenzo Semple Jr. (based on the 1970 novel by Loren Singer, with a non-credited rewrite by Robert Towne). The narrative contains obvious allusions to the JFK assassination, and (in retrospect) reflects the political paranoia of the Nixon era (perhaps this was serendipity, as the full implications of the Watergate scandal were not yet in the rear view mirror while the film was in production).
The Conversation – Written and directed by Francis Ford Coppola, this 1974 thriller does not involve a “political” assassination, but does share crucial themes with other films here. It was also an obvious influence on Brian De Palma’s 1981 thriller, Blow Out (see my review below).
Gene Hackman leads a fine cast as a free-lance surveillance expert who begins to obsess that a conversation he captured between a man and a woman in San Francisco’s Union Square for one of his clients is going to directly lead to the untimely deaths of his subjects.
Although the story is essentially an intimate character study, set against a backdrop of corporate intrigue, the dark atmosphere of paranoia, mistrust and betrayal that permeates the film mirrors the political climate of the era (particularly in regards to its timely proximity to the breaking of the Watergate scandal).
24 years later, Hackman played a similar character in Tony Scott’s 1998 political thriller Enemy of the State. Some have postulated “he” is the same character (you’ve gotta love the fact that there’s a conspiracy theory about a fictional character). I don’t see that myself; although there is obvious homage with a brief shot of a photograph of Hackman’s character in his younger days that is actually a production still from …The Conversation!
Blowout -This 1981 thriller is one of Brian De Palma’s finest efforts. John Travolta stars as a sound man who works on schlocky horror films. While making a field recording of ambient nature sounds, he unexpectedly captures audio of a fatal car crash involving a political candidate, which may not have been an “accident”. The proof lies buried somewhere in his recording-which naturally becomes a coveted item by some dubious characters. His life begins to unravel synchronously with the secrets on his tape.
The director employs an arsenal of influences (from Antonioni to Hitchcock), but succeeds in making this one of his most “De Palma-esque” with some of the deftest set-pieces he’s ever done (particularly in the climax).
Three Days of the Condor – One of seven collaborations between star Robert Redford and director Sydney Pollack, and one of the seminal “conspiracy-a-go-go” films. With a screenplay adapted by Lorenzo Semple, Jr. and David Rayfiel from James Grady’s novel “Six Days of the Condor”, this 1975 film offers a twist on the idea of a government-sanctioned assassination.
Here, you have members of the U.S. clandestine community burning up your tax dollars to scheme against other members of the U.S. clandestine community (no honor among conspirators, apparently). Also with Faye Dunaway, Cliff Robertson and Max von Sydow.
Pollack’s film conveys the same atmosphere of dread and paranoia that infuses The Conversation and The Parallax View. The final scene plays like an eerily prescient prologue for All the President’s Men, which wasn’t released until the following year. An absolutely first-rate political thriller with more twists and turns than you can shake a dossier at.
JFK – The obvious bookend to this cycle is Oliver Stone’s controversial 1991 film, in which Gary Oldman gives a suitably twitchy performance as Lee Harvey Oswald. However, within the context of Stone’s film, to say that we have a definitive portrait of JFK’s assassin (or “assassins”, plural) is difficult, because, not unlike Agatha Christie’s fictional detective Hercule Poirot, Stone suspects no one…and everyone.
The most misunderstood aspect of the film, I think, is that Stone is not favoring any prevalent narrative; and that it is by the director’s definition a “speculative” political thriller. Those who have criticized the approach seem to have missed that Stone himself has stated from the get-go that his goal was to provide a “counter myth” to the “official” conclusion of the Warren Commission (usually referred to as the “lone gunman theory”).
Stone’s narrative is so seamless and dynamic, many viewers didn’t get that he was mashing up at least a dozen *possible* scenarios. The message is right there in the script, when “Mr. X” (Donald Sutherland) advises New Orleans D.A. Jim Garrison (Kevin Costner), “Don’t believe me. Do your own work…your own thinking.”
JICYMI-This 2023 episode of “The Commonwealth Club” features Mark Shaw, best-selling author of 6 books related to the Kennedy assassination, reflecting on the 60th anniversaryof the tragedy:
