Jesse Ventura: Great to be on again, Cenk. Thank you.

Uygur: All right. You outline a lot of conspiracies throughout American history here including one against Abraham Lincoln, one against FDR. Have these forces, have forces been working against our democracy throughout the history of this country?

Ventura: I think that there's been a lot of things that have gone on that have been certainly swept under the rug throughout the years. And certainly, we're not taught these things in our history books at all. I found the amazing thing about the Abraham Lincoln murder was that, you know, I really didn't know that eight other people had been tried, all convicted and four of them sentenced to death, including the first woman in America. And I followed up on that by asking my nephew, who is 15, what he had learned in school and what he knew about Abraham Lincoln, and he said he just had it two weeks earlier and again, all he knew about was John Wilkes Booth shooting him in the Ford Theater and getting chased down and killed in the farmhouse.

Uygur: And in fact, of course, it's much larger than that.

Ventura: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, there were eight other people involved. The whole conspiracy actually involved, they were going to try to kill Lincoln, Vice President Johnson, Secretary of State Seward as well as Ulysses Grant, the General.

Uygur: But why do you think it's relevant that they only discuss John Wilkes Booth and not the whole conspiracy?

Ventura: I think it's relevant because it always sets us up that only one person ever does it and that no one's ever involved. It's the old "lone nut" thing. And really, most people think that John Wilkes Booth was probably a lone nut when he truly was not.

Uygur: So if they're not lone nuts, all these assassins throughout American history, what are they? Are they all part of this, a similar movement, different movements?

Ventura: Well, it's hard to say. You know, the ones in the 60s all had a common denominator except the Kennedy murders. But if you look at Malcolm X, if you look at Martin Luther King, and if you look at John Lennon, all of them were under heavy CIA surveillance when they were killed. And I, being a former Navy SEAL, understand that before you do an op, you do plenty of surveillance and plenty of intel work to make sure it goes correctly. And the real only common denominator to the whole thing is the CIA.

Uygur: You think the CIA might've had Lennon killed?

Ventura: Well, there's a good possibility, because Mark David Chapman was very strange. If you read about how that killing took place, Lennon was under heavy CIA surveillance, Reagan had just won, and Lennon was making a huge comeback at the time and they thought that he could galvanize the left because he was very liberal. And Chapman, if you look at his background, it's nothing like what the media told us about. The media told us he was infatuated with The Beatles, infatuated with John Lennon, and that's why he killed him. That's not true at all. In fact, he could've cared less about The Beatles, his actual favorite musician was Todd Rundgren, and he hated guns. And yet, the night he killed Lennon, he dropped into a professional shooting position, put five rounds in Lennon that a drill instructor would be proud of, and then his most strange behavior was when he was done. He had three opportunities to escape. He could've either ran into Central Park, he could've got onto the subway a block away and disappeared, or he could've just disappeared in the Manhattan streets. Instead, he backed up into the shadows, dropped the gun, pulled out J.D. Salinger's Catcher in the Rye, and was reading it when the cops arrived.

Uygur: Governor Ventura, you know, I hear that and I think, so, why? Or how, more interestingly? I mean, do you think he wasn't deranged or do you think that the CIA drugged him?

Ventura: I think he very well could've been. You know about the MKULTRA program, of mind control and all that. That's all documented, in the 50s and 60s. There was a good chance, in my opinion, he was what you would call, quote-unquote, a "Manchurian candidate".

Uygur: Do you think that stuff works? Because I was never under the impression that they had successfully done that.

Ventura: Well, on my television show we looked into it and I think that it absolutely could work if they have someone for over a year, because hypnosis is a very powerful thing. And you can't get someone under hypnosis the first time, generally, to commit an act of violence or a crime, but you certainly could do it over, say, a year or two if you had control of that person. And we actually met a guy who claims to be a Manchurian candidate, I thought he was crazy, and when I got done interviewing him, I turned to my crew after he left and I said well, if we don't believe it, he certainly does. But the unique thing about this guy was he got involved in a bad auto accident and was injured and he started getting his memory back. He went in for an MRI, and they found four microchips in his body. The MRI went ballistic. Now, how did he get them in his body? And what do they do?

Uygur: We're talking to Governor Jesse Ventura, former Governor of Minnesota of course. And the TV show he's referring to is on truTV, and his book is American Conspiracies. You mention the media on several occasions there, Governor. Why do you think they play along?

Ventura: I don't know. You know, the media seems to... Well, I think the reason that they play along with the government so well is they don't want to lose their access, because if they start asking difficult, uncomfortable questions, they're not going to be let into press conferences and things like that, so they'll lose their ability to be able to report on the government. And I think that's one of the things the government holds over the media, that if you step too far and ask too many pointed questions, we won't let you in anymore.

Uygur: I want to go back to one of the earlier chapters in your book about FDR and the plot against him.

Ventura: Yeah.

Uygur: Also something that isn't talked about very much. Because I think that might tie in a lot of other strands that we're talking about here. Tell us, for a lot of people that are not familiar with that, what was the plot against FDR?

Ventura: Well, basically it was a plot done by Wall Street, pretty much. It was done by the heavy finance people. They thought that FDR was going far too socialist coming out of the Depression and all that, probably much the way they go after President Obama today for his health care, you know, bringing socialism into America. Like, you know, we don't dare have any type of socialism here at all. I believe you have to have a balance between the two. We saw capitalism pure didn't work, we just went through it. When they took off all the deregulation on Wall Street, look what we ended up with. So I think there's a fine line you have to... You don't want to go all socialist either, because Russia fell because of that, so you've got to have a combination, in my opinion, of both.

Uygur: But fill us in on some of the details. How did they try to get that...

Ventura: Oh, and anyway... Oh, yeah, the FDR. OK. What they tried to do, all these bigshots, they literally tried to replace FDR with a coup. And they picked out General Smedley Butler, who was going to replace FDR temporarily, but the problem was Smedley Butler had won a couple of Congressional Medals of Honor, and they picked the wrong guy because he informed on them and reported it all and they all got caught. Yet none of them were prosecuted, nor none of them ever... The thing was basically hushed under the rug.

Uygur: And I agree with you when you say General Butler should be a hero that we should all talk about and we should know more about because he helped to save the country in a lot of ways. And you know, it's an interesting phenomenon that you point to where capitalists sometimes, in order to make more money, want to be able to control other governments, because General Butler also talks about how he went to Latin America and did the bidding of corporate America earlier in his career. Whenever they wanted to control the oil in Mexico or the fruit in Central America, they would use the Marines, basically.

Ventura: Absolutely.

Uygur: And so they want to have some degree of control over here as well. But, you know... And so have these conspiracies happened? Well, the FDR thing's a fact, obviously, and we see many others. We talked on an earlier time that you appeared on the program about the Gulf of Tonkin, and that was a conspiracy and a lie by the American government. The question is, how does that translate to now? I mean, are there still the same forces at play? Are they doing the same tricks? Are they different tricks?

Ventura: I think it's worse today. I think it's the old cliche, they got away with it before, so they certainly can get away with it now. And I think it's actually worse today with all of that going on.

Uygur: Why worse?

Ventura: I mean, today the government uses national security to cover up anything they do wrong. You know, if they break the law or violate the Constitution or whatever they do and it gets exposed, the first thing they do then is call it national security, sweep it under the rug, and lock it up for 50 years where we can't see anything. Classic case is Lee Harvey Oswald. I mean, when you look at him, OK, what they told us is this guy was a Marine Private, got out of the Marines, defected to the Soviet Union, married a Russian girl, came back, got angry at Kennedy, and killed him. Well, if that's the case, why would anything need to be locked up because of national security? Did you know today you still cannot get Lee Harvey Oswald's tax return because of national security? Now, how would his tax return affect national security? Well, if he was a paid CIA agent or something and got money from the government, it would leave a paper trail. And if he was connected to any of the alphabet agencies, which I believe he was, that would lead you right there by seeing his tax return.

Uygur: Governor Ventura, how do you think the CIA, which you mention in a lot of these plots, is connected to the business interests on Wall Street, etc., which you also mention as organizing some of these plots?

Ventura: I'm sorry, come at me with that again?

Uygur: How do you think the CIA is connected to the big business interests?

Ventura: Well, you know, after reading Fletcher Prouty, Colonel Fletcher Prouty's book, the CIA is a complete fraud at what it does. They tell us that it's to gather intelligence and all that, but the reality is the CIA's job is to go out and start wars in third-world countries, according to Colonel Fletcher Prouty.

Uygur: Why is that?

Ventura: Because... You want me to go into all that? OK. Well, what...

Uygur: I mean, because it's a natural question. Why would we want to start a war?

Ventura: OK. Well, you've got to back up, then. You've got to go to the end of World War II. Right before we dropped the bombs on Japan, we thought that we were going to have to invade, so they moved huge armaments into Okanawa. Well, then they subsequently dropped the two bombs and they didn't have to invade. Well, Fletcher Prouty, in his book, told what happened to all those armaments. You know what happened to them?

Uygur: What's that?

Ventura: Half of them were sent to Korea and half of them were given to Ho Chi Minh. Because what took place at the end of World War II was a meeting that Prouty was privy to where the four of them got together and talked, and Prouty refers to the elites being even who's above them. Now, who's above Stalin, who's above Roosevelt, who's above Churchill? Who knows? But apparently it scared these people with the nuclear bomb so bad that they decided at that point, according to Prouty, that all wars from then on would be fought in third-world countries, they would have no direct objective for victory for the military, and when you looked over the past 50 years, that's exactly what has happened. So the truth is in what happened. And when you look at it, it's exactly what Fletcher Prouty talked about.

Uygur: You know, I, of course, I don't know what to think of all the specifics. I mean, I read what you wrote and it's interesting and compelling in many ways, but you know, for those who are skeptical, then you look at Iraq. We sold them weapons, Don Rumsfeld sold them weapons, and then invaded Iraq for an indefinite war with no end to get rid of those weapons.

Ventura: Yep. Well, we also did the same thing with Iran.

Uygur: Well, we haven't invaded them yet, but...

Ventura: Well, we haven't invaded them, but we supplied Iran with massive amount of weapons to fight with, too. We supplied both Iran and Iraq with the weapons that they used against each other.

Uygur: And the guy who set up Halliburton's office in Tehran, Iran against American law, but he did it through a subsidiary in the Cayman Islands, was a guy named Dick Cheney.

Ventura: Yeah.

Uygur: So you look at this and you go, hmm. Things that make me go hmm. So we're talking to Governor Jesse Ventura, the book is American Conspiracies. He's also got a show on truTV. Governor, my thought is, in the old days when you had private corporations and private banks and you had the Rothschilds and you had the Rockefellers, etc., you could do a smoke-filled room, right? But these days, in some ways it is scarier, as you mentioned earlier, because they don't need the smoke-filled room and they don't need to get together. I feel that since the advent of public corporations, the system self-selects the greedy, self-selects the people who are going to play ball. So if you need to have Generals who are going to start wars or who are going to advocate for longer wars, well, it helps that they're going to get hired by the military industrial complex later, after they retire.

Ventura: Yep. Sure.

Uygur: And that goes on and on. The bankers, of course, if you're Nomi Prins at Goldman Sachs and you grow a conscience, well, you're no longer welcome there, and they look for someone who's not encumbered with a conscience who can go ahead and buy politicians.

Ventura: Always remember that at any war, regardless of big or small and where it takes place, there are people that profit tremendously from it. You know, there's money to be made at war, and that's one of the reasons I believe they fight them.

Uygur: And now, finally, let me ask you about how it works in present-day, too, because you see people like Glenn Beck and O'Reilly and Hannity and the whole right-wing media push for the wars and push for deregulation of the banks, all the things that wind up helping these same guys. So to put it in kind of a funny way, do you think that they're in on it?

Ventura: I don't know. I don't think they're directly in on it, but I think that the higher-ups are in on it. These are just the mouthpieces. You know, they're the ones that go out there and are the mouthpieces that we see, but clearly, I know because when I had my short-lived thing with MSNBC, my biggest fight with them was they were telling me what subjects I had to cover, you know? It came down from upstairs. And these guys will deny it, but I know it's not true. All of the stuff comes down from upstairs, because if you look at all their shows, they all do the same topics, it's just a different guy's perspective of it.

Uygur: Do you think that that's the same process of self-selection? So if Mike Malloy is a left-winger who rants on the left, well, he doesn't get hired by Roger Ailes because Roger Ailes isn't interested in that message on Fox News.

Ventura: Yep.

Uygur: But if you're pro-war and you do the same kind of rants, well, then you get hired by Fox News.

Ventura: Yep.

Uygur: If you're...

Ventura: Well, the great example is myself. When I came out of office, I was the hottest commodity out there. I was the voice of the independent. CNN, MSNBC, and Fox got in a bidding war for me. MSNBC won. I went to do my show, they were putting together a five-day-a-week show for me, and then all of a sudden, a phone call came to one of my subordinates, and they said, "Is it true that the Governor doesn't support the war in Iraq?" This was right before, as the Iraq war was going on, getting ready to hype up. And they said no. There was a deafening pause at the other end. They said, "Does New Jersey know about this?" And the person said, "I don't know." And then they said, "Is there a chance he'd change his mind?" And this person that worked with me four years at the Capitol, he said, "I don't think so." Because he said, the Governor's pretty staunch when he gets, you know, you'd really have to sway him. And the war ain't gonna sway him. Well, it turned out they wouldn't put me on the air. They paid me for all three years, they pulled my show, and I sat and collected paychecks and I couldn't say anything because my contract said I couldn't do any cable nor any news shows for three years. Yeah.

Uygur: That's really interesting because that's exactly what they did to Ashleigh Banfield. When she made the speech against the Iraq War, they literally put her in a closet and paid the rest of her contract so she couldn't talk to anyone else.

Ventura: Yep. And they did it also, if you recall, to Phil Donahue.

Uygur: That's right.

Ventura: They had just hired Phil. Phil was their highest-rated show when they pulled him. Have you ever heard of a network pulling its highest-rated show? Never. And remember, this was at the time that MSNBC was trying to be Fox Lite. They weren't liberal like they are now.

Uygur: Right. So, you know, I remember they put out a story at the time saying that you wanted to do the show from Mexico and that that's why they didn't want to do it.

Ventura: That's a complete lie. All I did was I said the show, I wanted to do the show from Minneapolis because... And my reasoning was this. Not only was it my home and I didn't want to relocate, and I had the power to do it, but second, I told them, look, all these shows take place on the East Coast and the West Coast. Why not get a Midwestern perspective for a change?

Uygur: So, but then what happened there? Because you know, MSNBC...

Ventura: They wouldn't put me on because of my opposition to the Iraq War.

Uygur: I hear you, but so then MSNBC, you think, is not putting you on, and not putting all those people on because they're against the Iraq War, but now their primetime, at least, not their morning but their primetime is progressive. So what do you think changed?

Ventura: Ratings. They finally realized they were never going to beat Fox, so then they made... Well, if you saw, when Keith Olbermann first came on, he was conservative. Then all of a sudden he made an about face 180 degrees and became a liberal.

Uygur: I'm sure he would contest that.

Ventura: Well, he might contest it, but at the moment he was hired, they were still a conservative station.

Uygur: Let me ask you one more thing. When you were the Governor, you say in the book that the CIA came and talked to you. What did they talk to you about?

Ventura: Well, they asked if they could meet with me in the basement of the Capitol, and I agreed, and I went down there, there were 23 members of the CIA. All they wanted to know about was how I got elected.

Uygur: Why do they care? They're not supposed to operate inside the United States.

Ventura: Exactly. I asked them that. Well, I called my friend Dick Marcinko later because I was confused, too. Do you know who Dick Marcinko is?

Uygur: No.

Ventura: Well, he's the... He writes all those Rogue Warrior books. He's the former commander of SEAL Team Six, friend of mine that is very well-connected, operated Red Cell and all that. He's a true warrior. And I called Dick and I told him what happened, and Dick said, "Well," he said, "I don't know, but I'd give you my opinion." I said, "Tell me." He said, "They didn't see you coming." So they're trying to learn how you won. Now, did they want to know to stop another independent from being elected? That's what I think it was for, so they could learn how I got elected so that they could attempt later to derail any other third-party candidates that could do what I did.

Uygur: You know, there's, of course, a theory that people, whoever they are, are not interested in people who don't play ball. You don't play ball, Eliot Spitzer didn't play ball, Pete Stark didn't play ball, Ashleigh Banfield didn't play ball, and you begin to see a pattern here. Let's take Eliot Spitzer as an example. Do you think that that was a coincidence that the bank happened to out him on those finances or do you think that was part of a larger agenda?

Ventura: I really don't know. I haven't studied the Spitzer, what happened to him, but I do know he was investigating things that I don't think they wanted him going into.

Uygur: Yeah, well, there's certainly, I remember when he got...

Ventura: And then unfortunately for him, he decided to be a womanizer and they nailed him. You know, if you're going to take them on, you'd better make sure you've got no skeletons in the closet.

Uygur: Because they will come for you.

Ventura: Absolutely. He's a prime example of it. They buried him over that thing, and he lost his governorship over it.

Uygur: All right. Jesse Ventura's new book is American Conspiracies, you can check out his show on truTV as well. Governor Ventura, great having you on The Young Turks. I really appreciate that.

Ventura: Always a pleasure to be on. And keep up the good work and keep talking about stuff becuase we still have to, we're going to have to fight for our First Amendment rights here pretty quick. We've already lost the Fourth Amendment, illegal search and seizure, and they've taken away habeas corpus from us, and I can't believe President Obama hasn't reinstated that stuff and got rid of the Patriot Act.

Uygur: There are a lot of unbelievable things about the direction Obama's taking.

Ventura: Yeah. I think they got to him. Whoever "they" is.

Uygur: All right, we're going to have to talk about that next time. That's a good topic. Governor Ventura, thank you so much for joining us.

Ventura: Thank you, my pleasure. Have a good one.

Uygur: All right, you too.

Ventura: Bye-bye.

Uygur: Bye-bye. Young Turks.