The New Neo

I consider that event Ground Zero for the popularization in the US of what one might call conspiracy culture. That’s not the best term for it, because conspiracies sometimes exist and are sometimes real. Maybe I should call it false conspiracy culture, or default conspiracy culture, which involves the assumption that conspiracies are operating in certain events even when there is little to no evidence of it.

I’ve written many many posts on the subject of the JFK assassination and the conspiracy theories that have proliferated in its wake. You can find them here, and I’d like to call particular attention to this post. In it, I quote the Bugliosi book on the subject, Reclaiming History, which can be found online here:

It is remarkable that conspiracy theorists can believe that groups like the CIA, military-industrial complex, and FBI would murder the president, but cannot accept the likelihood, even the possibility, that a nut like Oswald would flip out and commit the act, despite the fact that there is a ton of evidence that Oswald killed Kennedy, and not an ounce showing that any of these groups had anything to do with the assassination.

It is further remarkable that these conspiracy theorists aren’t troubled in the least by their inability to present any evidence that Oswald was set up and framed. For them, the mere belief or speculation that he was is a more-than-adequate substitute for evidence. More importantly, there is a simple fact of life that Warren Commission critics and conspiracy theorists either don’t realize or fail to take into consideration, something I learned from my experience as a prosecutor; namely, that in the real world—you know, the world in which when I talk you can hear me, there will be a dawn tomorrow, et cetera—you cannot be innocent and yet still have a prodigious amount of highly incriminating evidence against you…

…[T]he evidence against Oswald is so great that you could throw 80% of it out the window and there would still be more than enough to prove his guilt beyond all reasonable doubt…

The Warren Commission critics and conspiracy theorists display an astonishing inability to see the vast forest of evidence proving Oswald’s guilt because of their penchant for obsessing over the branches, even the individual branches. And, because virtually all of them have no background in criminal investigation, they look at each leaf (piece of evidence) by itself, hardly ever in relation to, and in the context of, all the other evidence.

Whenever I post about the assassination, people argue with me about my certainty that Oswald killed him and that he acted alone. It’s no surprise that this would occur, because the vast majority of Americans believe that it was a conspiracy of some sort. The most recent poll I could quickly find right now is a 2023 Gallup poll, but it says what most polls have said for many years: that a little less than a third of Americans believe that Oswald was the sole assassin. In fact, if you look at this chart, there have been times when even fewer Americans have believed that:

I’m harping on this because I’ve long thought that this strain of American life is damaging. No, I don’t automatically trust the government – that would be absurd. But I do try to look at evidence and to use logic, realizing that absolute and complete certainty is never possible.

And of course, it’s possible to ignore the evidence by saying it’s manufactured, which already presupposes the existence of a conspiracy (making up false evidence), further solidifies that belief, and then uses the resultant state of mind in the populace to plant an idea about who is really to blame.

The ways in which I’ve seen this play out in recent years are many. Russiagate was a conspiracy theory fostered by actual conspiracists on the left to hurt the right, and is believed to this day by an enormous number of Democrats. The uncovering of the perpetrators of the conspiracy theory, and attempts to describe what happened, is itself called a conspiracy theory. Likewise, we indeed were told lies about COVID, and they were damaging, but they also eroded trust so much that now people believe all sorts of things connected with the vaccine in the absence of actual evidence or through misrepresentation and/or misinterpretation of actual evidence (I’ve written a great deal about that, too; for example, here, here, and here).

There are other examples, but the most recent one is the ancient conspiracy theory about Jews running the world and being responsible for everything that’s bad. It has the appeal of being simple, and there are those on left and right busily engaged in spreading the word. Many times recently I’ve heard Candace Owens – who has gazillions of devoted followers and does indeed merit the title “influencer” – reference the JFK assassination, tie it to Kirk’s assassination, and accuse just about everyone of killing Kirk but mostly the Jews/Israelis. She explicitly says Israel killed JFK, and doesn’t even seem to feel the need to offer any evidence whatsoever, because her audience is so ready to believe anything about the killing of Kennedy.

The JFK assassination functions in the US as the Mother of All Conspiracy Theories, and it’s a very useful one indeed to those who would spread Jew-hatred – or any other hatred or distrust.