I watched a large part of this 3-hour 2024 interview with Daniel Sheehan. Sheehan makes a blizzard of claims of varying degrees of plausibility. I didn't bother fact-checking many, because he asserted them all with absurdly high self-assurance, even though some of them stood out as obviously implausible. The ones I checked were:
1. JFK was shot from the grassy knoll. This of course was so thoroughly refuted by the Zapruder film and JFK autopsy that for many decades the less-silly conspiracy theorists have felt compelled to claim that both the film and body had been tampered with. (They don't bother to explain why the best shooter would be so badly mis-positioned that the body would need later tampering.) But there is a third debunk for this claim: Zapruder would have seen any shooter behind the fence on the grassy knoll. See for yourself with these images https://t.co/fIkurHrWUS. Anybody who confidently posits a grassy knoll shooter just isn't serious about the case.
2. Betty Hill's star map authenticates her alien abduction story. No, that star map was already dubious by 1980 (see Carl Sagan on Cosmos) and thoroughly debunked by the 2000s. See the summary at https://armaghplanet.com/betty-hills-ufo-star-map-the-truth.html.
3. Yamashita's gold. Sheehan claims that 33B ounces ($1.2T/$32/oz) of Yamashita's gold were spirited from the Philippines to Switzerland to finance nefarious "robber baron" schemes. But the known world supply of all above-the-ground gold is only 6B ounces. It's profoundly unserious to claim that somebody has an extra 33B ounces.
4. The "1934" FDR court-packing scheme was about corporate right of contract. Aside from the date being 3yrs off, this is still just demonstrably wrong. Just read e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lochner_era#Ending. Or just ask your favorite AI:
Was the Lochner Court's resistance to New Deal legislation based on the commerce clause and how much contract rights (regardless of corporate involvement) were protected from government police powers by the 14th amendment? Or was it more based on corporate personhood?
Sheehan's fourth claim here is not as kooky as the three above, but if Sheehan fancies himself a constitutional scholar then he should know better. (As a Libertarian I will half-agree with Sheehan by saying the problem with corporate law is not personhood but rather limited liability. However, any rights-respecting scheme to park unlimited liability on some officers or shareholders would ultimately not make much difference, because of contractual arbitrage.)
