Episode 1: The Useful Idiot (The Second Oswald)

Kerry Thornley starts believing he was part of CIA’s MKUltra brainwashing experiments to erase his memories to frame Lee Harvey Oswald. Soon, Kerry falls down the conspiracy rabbit hole and alienates his friends with the exception of Robert Anton Wilson. Together they begin a disinformation campaign blaming everything on the Illuminati, and inadvertently influence the formation of QAnon.

New Orleans’ district attorney Jim Garrison emerged as a white knight from the dark forest of conspiracies to prosecute a charming gay businessman, Clay Shaw, for the assassination of the President. He believed there were too many coincidences in his city between the CIA, disgruntled Cubans, and Lee Harvey Oswald. He also felt that Kerry Thornley was involved in a plot to set up Oswald as a patsy.

One of the conspiracy theories floating around is that Lee Harvey Oswald was a double agent working for the Soviets. A "Manchurian Candidate" programmed to be an unwitting assassin in an international plot hatched by who else – his mother. Meanwhile, Kerry Thornley moves to New Orleans to write his novel about his buddy, Oswald – and meets two shady characters who want to assassinate President Kennedy and frame a communist. Soon, Lee Harvey Oswald returns to the USA from the Soviet Union, and the plot begins with Kerry in the middle of it.

As a teenager in the boring 1950’s – Kerry Thornley created a spoof religion called Discordianism based on chaos in a bowling alley. Later, Thornley joined the Marines and befriends Lee Harvey Oswald, who becomes the inspiration for a novel he plans to write. After Oswald defects to the Soviet Union – Thornley becomes a pawn in a grand conspiracy that he started writing about before it existed. And a plot that he may have inadvertently started.

THE SECOND OSWALD sheds light on a little known aspect of President John F. Kennedy’s assassination in Dallas, Texas on November 22, 1963. Could the accused assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, been set up to be the patsy? The series focuses on writer Kerry Thornley who served with Lee Harvey Oswald in the US Marines and wrote a novel about him a year before he killed JFK. Thornley would later implicate himself in the conspiracy and became a major influence on Q-Anon and other fringe underground groups through his writings. This is not just another conspiracy theory. The limited podcast series and play is written by former National Public Radio (NPR) commentator and Peabody award winner Andrei Codrescu.