Kuznick and Stone are the authors of The Untold History of the United States.
Sean Wilentz has a chapter on Untold History in his book, The Politicians & the Egalitarians : the Hidden History of American Politics
The entire interview is completely nuts. Stone and Kuznick want the United States to be allies with Putin's Russia and believe that it's the United States that is clamoring for war.
There's way too much silliness for anyone to sit through. At about the six-minute mark, Stone is upset that the United States is insulting Putin, at about the nine-minute mark they talk about Henry Wallace and say the United States could have avoided the Cold War, and at the twelve-minute mark, they talk about the United States invading Afghanistan. Of course, that never happened. In 2001, the Northern Alliance was fighting the Taliban and the Americans helped the Alliance march into Kabul.
It even appears that Oliver Stone is a 9/11 truther. Here is an excerpt from a transcript (12:11)
Tucker Carlson: Let me ask you .. do you think the people who said that we need a new Pearl Harbor in order to rebuild. How do you think they felt about 9/11?
Peter Kuznick: I think they saw it as a tragedy and an opportunity. You know, I think they ...
Tucker Carlson: You're not suggesting they knew about it.
Peter Kuznick: No, I'm not suggesting that. And Oliver ...
Oliver Stone: I think it's a mystery.
Tucker Carlson: In what sense?
Oliver Stone: I think it's a mystery. I don't think it's solved, because all the events of 9/11 have not come out.
Tucker Carlson: No, they haven't. Why do you think that is?
Oliver Stone: I would have to really study this, but it's just so many questions I have, so many. It's, this is not the subject today. But yes, it leads to this feeling that there's a cabal, or something in Washington that has been there, kind of a strange ghost-like cabal that goes back to the 60s with Kennedy's murder.
Tucker Carlson: Yes.
Oliver Stone: ... that continues in some strange embodiment today. And I don't ask, it sounds, it sounds like it, but it's that strange concept. But you have to think about,
Tucker Carlson: We can't assess it because the files are still classified. 23 years later.
Oliver Stone: There is something about conspiracies now, I mean, all, a lot of the lunatics have come out of the asylum with no doubt,
Tucker Carlson: Yes.
Oliver Stone: But there's a lot out there in the public that really should be examined and questioned and ...
Tucker Carlson: Yes,
Oliver Stone: ... asked, and it's, that's what's the establishment is freaking out because it's, we're overloading it, you know, we're it's running over the rapids now they can't defend them anymore.
Tucker Carlson: Yes.
Oliver Stone: I mean this.
Tucker Carlson: Well, you were, you were once derided as a conspiracy ... I don't think so anymore.
Oliver Stone: But I'm still alive.
Tucker Carlson: You've lived to see your own vindication.
Oliver Stone: Well, yeah, in a sense. I mean, I'd love to see Kennedy understood better by the mass because, you know, you still hear this silly Lee Harvey Oswald did-it stuff, you know. I mean it then "allegedly". They never said alleged, you know, alleged killer.
Tucker Carlson: Yes.
Oliver Stone: They always say killer. But you know, those are, I feel sorry that that happened, but that's a bigger story now. It's a bigger story because now it's the world is at stake. It's not the life of one man. He had a vision, as Peter said, of humanizing Russia and bringing them into the world community. That was defeated when he was killed, that was very badly defeated. Khrushchev fell shortly thereafter, the premier of Russia, he fell too, because he wasn't sufficiently strong with the United States.
I would have loved to hear Oliver Stone expound on 9/11. But his idea that a cabal has taken over the United States since the JFK assassination is just plain lunacy.
There is also a discussion about censorship (36:50)
Oliver Stone: In this country. You've noticed the censorship has gotten far wor[se] -- you suffered from it,
Tucker Carlson: Yeah, well, certainly.
Oliver Stone: I suffered from it. I mean, it's you're [Kuznick] insulated because you're having tenure. But ...
Tucker Carlson: how many Oscars have you won?
Oliver Stone: I've won three.
Tucker Carlson: You've won three ...
Oliver Stone: That was a long time ago.
Tucker Carlson: Right.
Oliver Stone: No, but essentially, I got cut off because I did, the Putin interviews didn't help me in in Hollywood ..
Tucker Carlson: But you've been cut off before then, I think, hadn't you?
Oliver Stone: You know, my ability to make films was choked a little. You know, there isn't ... After 2000 things changed in the United States because we became the victim. We were suddenly -- the patriotism of the soldiers, we started Pearl Harbor [the film], Black Ship, Black Hawk Down. All the films were were different mentality than what I was presenting, which was a reality I thought to the American public, this military has to be ... why are we doing these military expeditions overseas, like in Vietnam? This is, what was my main point. I kept going at it and going at it, and I guess all of a sudden it became okay. But the people never voted. There was no candidate, there was no election that said, I'm against any empire. I want to bring it back, like back in William Brennan's, William Jennings Bryant's, back in 1898, I don't want empire. We never got the choice. We swallowed it.
Peter Kuznick: Let me give a different timeline on Oliver's history. I mean, Oliver was walking on water in Hollywood with Platoon, Wall Street, Born on the Fourth of July, and then he made JFK. And then everything changed, and they started attacking JFK seven, eight months before the film was produced ...
Oliver Stone: I remember.
Peter Kuznick: ... based on a stolen first draft of the script, at the New York Times, Los Angeles Times,
Oliver Stone: Washington Post, all that ...
Peter Kuznick: ... they were all going after him as a conspiracy theorist, and, you know, and it's a very controversial movie, which takes a lot of risks. And Oliver said, admitted at the time he didn't have all the answers, but he wanted to get the questions out there and make people think about some of these issues. But at that point, he went from being Hollywood's golden boy to being the conspiracy monger.
Tucker Carlson: I remember it very well -- and the late night comics, who are always tools of the existing order, jumped in. But why do you think that film and that topic, I mean ...
Peter Kuznick: ... because Americans had already disagreed with the Warren Commission, and even before Oliver's movie came out, an overwhelming majority of Americans thought, didn't think that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone. They didn't, from the very beginning, find that credible at all. In fact, four of the seven members of the Warren Commission didn't think that, or thought that there was likely a second ...
Oliver Stone: Yes.
Peter Kuznick: ... second gun,
Oliver Stone: Nor Robert Kennedy, nor Lyndon Johnson,
Peter Kuznick: Connally.
Oliver Stone: Jackie Kennedy, so many people.
Tucker Carlson: Hale Boggs.
Oliver Stone: Fidel Castro, Charles de Gaulle, various British leaders. Harold Macmillan.
Tucker Carlson: Did you ever talk to Castro? You knew Castro?
Oliver Stone: Yeah, sure.
Tucker Carlson: What did he say about it?
Oliver Stone: Oh, it's, he was so sad, because he really was liked Kennedy, and he was hoping for a deal, they were in back door negotiations. Kennedy understood the Cuban Revolution, and he said eloquent [things] about it. He understood why the people were - that Cuba had been the most corrupt island in the American Empire and the Caribbean since the Platt amendment in 2001.
Peter Kuznick: 1901.
Oliver Stone: 1901. But a lot of this is economic. Let's not lose sight of that. You see what they got after World War Two was an economic empire, which is -- it was working. People were investing in the war economy, and they were prosperous,
Tucker Carlson: Yes,
Oliver Stone: but you saw the budgets grew and grew and grew. Here we are now with a trillion dollar defense budget, right? Which insane? Because we have how many bases abroad, 800 bases. That was never the intention of Eisenhower or any of those people -- to have, to control the world, to dominate every place in the world, Asia and Europe and South America, this is a gigantic empire. Do you realize how busy they are, every day trying to run this thing? Everything is coming ...
Personally, I believe there's an invasion coming up. It's either going to be Iran or but I hope not. Israel is a proxy army for us. Certainly Trump supports them. And you know that Trump supports, Trump is very zealous about Israel, scary. But also, don't overlook Venezuela, which is still the one of the richest countries in the world with all its oil. Some people believe that is an easy, easy target for Trump to knock off. I pray not because it's going to be a battle. But this doesn't end, is what I'm saying. They plot every day. They they - imagine the world map. You got the China, the China challenge right, sending ships constantly, stating our supremacy right in the wa ... in the seas,
Peter Kuznick: Freedom of the navigation.
Oliver Stone: and China, it's, it's crazy. I mean, I understand economically. Take it on. Be competitive with China, fine. But this, we can be economically friendly. In other words, we can be competitors. I don't see why we can't be in business together, as with Russia. Russia was a capitalist country. It's no longer a communist country.
Tucker Carlson: Yes.
Oliver Stone: So as much as we hate communism, it doesn't make sense to antagonize Russia. They can be our partners in climate change in so many ways. Their nuclear energy industry is one of the best in the world, as is China. They can teach us, we can build SMRs in quantity, if we wanted to, we can really solve climate change. We don't have to sit here, victims of it. But this is all - this is Kennedy thinking. This is what we need. We need leadership. We need a De Gaulle, somebody who has a vision of the world, Trump, to some degree, has a vision.
"Trump, to some degree, has a vision," says Stone. Really? Well, I am not surprised that Stone likes Trump because of their joint affinity with Vladimir Putin.
Stone and Carlson paint themselves as victims of unjust censorship. Stone can't face the reality that he made a tendentious film about the JFK assassination, and that he victimized Clay Shaw for a second time. Stone's career went on a downward spiral because everybody thought he had gone over the deep end with JFK. It wasn't that he interviewed Putin, but that he slobbered all over him.
They mention several people who purportedly believe there was a conspiracy in the JFK assassination -- even Harold Macmillan. Does anybody really care what Harold Macmillan thought about the JFK assassination? Or Jackie? And Kuznick is just plain wrong when he says that four of the seven Warren Commission members believed there was a second gunman. A few of them were uneasy with the single-bullet theory, but that was only because the Warren Commission did not do a good enough job of explaining it. They were all convinced that Oswald fired the shot that killed Kennedy.
Stone believes there is some sort of American empire in which American leaders are pulling the strings of everything around the world. In his view, no other country has any agency. What is really appalling is that Stone believes that Israel is a proxy army for the United States.
He also believes that China and Russia could be partners in fighting climate change. But China has repeatedly said it has no interest in that, and is continually excused in international agreements from doing anything on the climate front. Stone wants to compete economically with China - but says nothing about China stealing intellectual property and flooding markets with cheap goods made with slave labor. He cares little about repression of the Uighurs, the elimination of political rights in Hong Kong, or China's continual threatening behavior towards Taiwan.
Towards the end of the interview the three talk about how little students know about history (1:33:30)
Peter Kuznick: So much history that people don't know. I was talking about the ignorance about World War Two. Well, I did an anonymous survey with college students, all of whom were A students in high school, and I asked them, how many Americans died in World War Two? And the median answer I got was 90,000. So they're only off by 300,000 -- they were in the ballpark. I asked them how many Soviets died in World War Two, the median answer I got was 100,000. So they were only 27 million off, right? These are smart kids, and they know nothing. They couldn't understand World War Two. They couldn't understand the Cold War. They couldn't understand what's going on in Ukraine unless they know the history. This is why Oliver and I did The Untold History of the United States, to begin filling those blanks. Tulsi Gabbard was interviewed by the New York Times in 2019 and they asked her, what - it's a big article -- what podcasts do you watch? She says, "I don't want to talk about podcasts, but I just finished watching the Untold History of the United States, and everybody should watch it, because it fills in those blanks in the history that nobody knows, that we never learn about in this country." So 50 years from now, it depends, really, because it's going on in Japan. Oliver and I wrote an article after one of our trips in Japan called "Partners in Historical Falsification: the United States and Japan." You know it's going on. Russia. It's going everywhere. People try to sanitize, whitewash their history on the assumption that if people know true history, then they're going to rebel and want something different and something better, because, if anything, History teaches you that what is this now is not what has to exist or what should exist -- as human beings can create a much different world, and that's what the lesson of it. So, it's not just to learn the past for the sake of the past. It's to learn the past so you can shape a better future.
Tucker Carlson: Of course,
Peter Kuznick: and that's what, that's what Oliver and ..
Tucker Carlson: It's the most reliable guidepost to the future. So, do you think, we're talking about JFK, and when it came out 30 years ago, you were roundly mocked. You are no longer mocked. People see it as likely, at the very least.
Oliver Stone: So yeah, I think so.
Tucker Carlson: It seems that way.
Oliver Stone: They're much more accepted. Yeah.
Tucker Carlson: So do you ...
Peter Kuznick: That was the critics, the public loved that movie.
Tucker Carlson: Oh, I know,
Oliver Stone: Yeah, it did well. Did very well.
Tucker Carlson: I remember.
Peter Kuznick: And that led to the assassination record review board,
Oliver Stone: a three-hour, six-minute movie.
Peter Kuznick: It led to the Assassination Records Review Board, which is why so many documents ...
Oliver Stone: which is why I did this documentary that I want you to see -- [JFK] Revisited. This is about the Assassination Records Review Board. They did good work. They didn't do everything, but they did some very good work and brought out new facts that are in this.
Tucker Carlson: Why are the intelligence agencies still holding on?
Oliver Stone: look, Trump had a shot in 2016 and he blew it. He got pressure from Pompeo and those guys, and then Biden killed it. And Biden know what he was doing. This is a very bad action he did. He's undercutting Congress, but they've been doing that for years anyway.
Tucker Carlson: So why? Why are they so intent on keeping them secret?
Oliver Stone: Well, there's obviously some bullshit in there. Yeah, obviously. I mean, I'm not saying that those are the who-killed-him names, but the same, we should know more about those CIA guys. There's files on them.
Tucker Carlson: Yes.
Oliver Stone: What was, what was Angleton up to, that's a big deal. James Angleton, the counter terrorism [sic] chief. What was Phillips? Dave Phillips. David Phillips up to? He was a very important factor in the Latin American operation from Guatemala on. He was the handler for Oswald, and Clay Shaw is in there. There's a bunch of people that, the fellow Joannides, that [Jefferson] Morley's chasing. George Joannides -- he's dirty all the way. He was in from the beginning, and they covered it up at the time. They brought him back as a witness for the HSCA, Anyway. Oh, and Harvey. Bill Harvey, I think he needs to be checked out.
Tucker Carlson: If you had to guess as to why they're holding these documents 60
odd years later, what would it be?
Oliver Stone: You know, they declare everything a secret. Everything, practically, it's just, it's, it's standard now.
Peter Kuznick: Massive classification. We need more transparency.
Tucker Carlson: Yes,
Oliver Stone: It's a habit that it's like a dog peeing on a hydrant, you know, it's just goes on and on and on. I don't understand - if there's a names and stuff, they they redact it, they're redacted. So I'm not looking to government, but I'm looking to honesty, that's what I'm looking for. And these bureaucrats in the government, how do they feel? What do they feel about their lives? Are they working for us? Are they working for secrecy? The people have not been dealt with honestly. And we know that. I think Americans know that. I think Americans are very cynical about the government,
Oliver Stone is right about secrecy -- there's too much of it. And so yes, the CIA will do everything it can to protect its methods and sources. Stone has no idea that the remaining documents have actually been released, but with redactions. He doesn't know that the Joannides personnel file was examined by the ARRB. And he still brings up the name Clay Shaw.
The most embarrassing part of this section is where Kuznick quotes Tulsi Gabbard about her fondness for their book. That is yet another reason why Gabbard is unqualified for a position in American intelligence. She also loved James Douglass's book JFK and the Unspeakable, a ridiculous conspiracy book that gets everything wrong.
Relevant link:
Kuznick is right that students know little about history, but his book is NOT the solution. Revisionist nonsense will do them no good. He talks about countries sanitizing their history -- but why are Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick sanitizing the history of Russia?
At the end of the interview, they want Donald Trump to pardon Julian Assange and Edward Snowden. Stone and Kuznick believe that Snowden should be lionized. Assange released data that put the life of Afghans at risk -- even after being warned that lives were in jeopardy. Snowden was not a whistleblower that deserves protection -- he stole state secrets and gave them to an adversary.
Previous Relevant Blog Posts Regarding Tucker Carlson
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Previous Relevant Blog Posts Regarding Oliver Stone
Stone believes he has been blacklisted in Hollywood because he interviewed Putin.
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Some people are noticing that Stone's affair with Nazarbayev is unseemly.
Stone has made an 8-hour documentary about Nazarbayev.
Stone gets it all wrong again.
Stone fawns over Putin in an interview with Chris Wallace.
Stone sounds insane in an interview with Russell Brand.
JFK Jr. walks out of a dinner with Oliver Stone.
Here is an opinion piece I wrote for the Jerusalem Post about Stone's appearance at the Jerusalem Film Festival.
Even a left-wing newspaper in Israel takes exception to Stone's appearance.
Stone flatters Putin in a Spanish interview.
Oliver Stone is on the side of Russia.
Stone tells the Guardian that Putin is a great leader for Russia.
Stone claims the United States might use a nuclear bomb in Ukraine.
At the Barcelona Film Festival Stone praises Putin and criticizes the United States.
Stone tweets that the United States might use nuclear weapons in Ukraine.
Stone tells Matt Taibbi that if Russia invades Ukraine, it can take what wants in a day.
The Telegraph criticizes Stone's friendship with Putin.
In a radio interview, Stone says the US is at fault for Putin's invasion of Ukraine.
Stone is one of many celebrities who side with Putin.
Stone posts on Facebook that Putin invaded Ukraine because of an American trap.
Putin showed Stone a fake video and Stone fell for it.
A bizarre excerpt from Stone's interviews with Putin.
Stone just repeats Putin's talking points on Ukraine.
Of course, the United States is at fault, according to Stone.
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Stone is against American arms sales to Taiwan.
A journalist tells the truth about Stone's rants.
Stone does not want a free Cuba.
Some people are noticing that Stone's affair with Nazarbayev is unseemly.