The Ivy League Writers Room and the Boston Marathon Conspiracy

• 9:18Tim meets Ivy League writers in Manhattan who went to Yale and Harvard but are incurious about anything outside mainstream consensus.
• 9:56He brings up a new book about the Boston Marathon at the party and watches Harvard grads dismiss it for being outside the mainstream.
• 10:28Tim contrasts the scene: Ivy Leaguers in a Tribeca townhouse versus him and Ray sweating in an East Village apartment with Russ Baker, exiled from mainstream discourse.
• 11:10These Yale writers love discussing political theory and the alt-right but check out entirely when the conversation shifts to how government machinery actually works.
• 11:49Michelle McPhee, an ABC News reporter who punched a cop in Boston, wrote a book claiming the Marathon bombers were FBI informants promised citizenship.
• 12:26Tim and Ray have argued the same point: Russia warned the feds about the bombers, yet the FBI claimed they didn't know who they were before catching them in a boat.
• 13:27The older bomber's uncle married into a CIA family, which prompts Tim to lay out the intrigue at the party while watching the room's faces contort in real time.
• 14:38McPhee's book contends the FBI turned Tamerlan Tsarnaev and promised him citizenship; when they don't follow through, he snaps and bombs the Marathon.
• 15:36Tsarnaev was likely involved in a triple murder in Waltham, Massachusetts in 2011, but the feds didn't question him because he was too valuable as an informant.
• 16:28Ibrahim Todashev, who the FBI killed during questioning, is another layer in the story that's too controversial to mention at parties of Ivy League kids.

Russ BakerBoston Marathon bombingMichelle McPheeFBIIbragim TodashevTamerlan TsarnaevCIAmaximum harmNoam ChomskyJohn Locke