Roundup

The New Neo Posted on by

(1) The East Germans had the Stasi. We have hackers and the MSM to dox those guilty of supporting the right to think for oneself and liberty.

(2) The jury in Sarah Palin’s defamation case returned a “not guilty” verdict for the Times. Absolutely no surprise for two reasons. The first is that the standard set in Sullivan for a public figure to win a case of defamation against a newspaper is nearly impossibly high, giving the press almost unlimited power to lie and defame with no repercussions as long as it’s against a public figure (that’s why they ran into some trouble with Sandmann, who wasn’t a public figure till they made him one). The second reason is that the judge said he’d throw out any guilty verdict, even as the jury was still deliberating, and as could easily be predicted the unsequestered jury heard about this. This sets up an appeal, but as Professor Jacobson writes:

This leaves Palin deprived of her most meaningful appeal — to reinstate a jury verdict in her favor if the appeals court reversed Rakoff’s dismissal of a verdict. Instead, Palin has a murky appeal on substance because she has a negative jury verdict, so the most the appeals court could do is order a new trial, not reinstate a favorable verdict.

However, I don’t think that the jury verdict was going to be favorable, even absent the judge’s intervention.

(3) Trudeau implies that a Jewish MP is a Nazi for “standing with people who wave swastikas” (that is, with the Freedom Convoy as filtered through leftist propaganda). And here’s the ironically-named Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland with more of the regime’s tyrannical pronouncements:

I don’t use the word “tyrannical” lightly here.

(4) Hillary Clinton and the MSM say pay no attention to that Durham behind the curtain.

An ode to the 1980s

The New Neo Posted on by

For me, the 1980s are somewhat of a blur, because I spent them having a baby and then raising that baby and intermittently working part-time. I was exhausted much of the time, and not really part of the zeitgeist.

Which means I don’t quite relate to this Daily Mail article by Julie Burchill, although I think she might be correct:

Growing up as a working-class female in the 1970s, I was expected never to express myself. And after a few glorious decades of freedom, I suddenly find myself in that situation again. Like when I was a child, I’m being told what I can and can’t say, except now the scolders are younger than me…

It was the last great decade of fun and freedom: after people realised that racist and sexist jokes were stupid but before the echo-chamber nit-picking of today. They were simpler times. We lived fully in every moment, without the distractions of social media and entertainment-streaming.

When I first saw a ‘portable telephone’ — the size of a brick — I remember a group of us sitting around it, poking it with fascination, like the monkeys at the start of 2001: A Space Odyssey.

It was indeed the 80s when I first saw a portable telephone, which was actually a car phone and if memory serves me it was actually somewhat larger than a brick. But a very exotic thing it was, owned by an old friend of my husband’s who had become very very very wealthy. Such a phone was way out of reach for us, and the thought of possessing one hardly even occurred to me.

The 80s may have been a blur for me, but the 90s were not. By then, several things had happened. One was that my baby was now in middle school and high school. Another was that I had a chronic pain problem from serious back and arm injuries (I’ve chronicled a lot of that on this blog; see this, for example). Still another was that I was back in school to get a Master’s degree.

It was that last experience that opened my eyes to some vast cultural and cognitive changes in the world around me – especially in the academic world but hardly limited to that. But it was highlighted in that setting, where I noticed what was then known as PC thought.

I had to take an undergraduate class at one point, and that’s where I first saw it clearly. The generation coming up all agreed on some things that seemed absurd to me: for example, that no student should ever hear a single world from a professor that the student found offensive or upsetting, and if such a thing occurred, it was by definition the professor’s fault, not the student’s. Standards were no longer objective but were instead subjective and feelings-based – if the student’s feelings were hurt, that was the only fact that needed to be considered.

This seemed so obviously wrong to me that I stood up in a rather large class and explained, but no one – and I mean no one agreed with me (or if they agreed with me they were already keeping their mouths shut), and I was simply ignored as they continued on their un-merry ways.

At the time I didn’t have much of a context in which to put the experience, but it alarmed me. I did immediately realize that it was generational in nature, that something in the atmosphere around these young people as they had been growing up had shaped their beliefs in this fashion. Now, in retrospect, I believe it was the slow ascendance of the leftists of my generation into power – that Gramscian march that began in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and of which I was unaware.

In other words, the generation beginning to come of age in the 1990s had been trained into these modes of thought, educationally speaking (and to some extent by parents). It was in the 1990s that the same 60s generation was now firmly in power, including ascending to the presidency but hardly limited to that.

I don’t think that 60s generation – my generation – was composed predominantly of leftists. I certainly wasn’t a leftist, although I was a Democrats (Democrat and leftist were not synonymous back then). But leftists often sought out a particular kind of power, the power to shape thinking and particularly the thinking of the younger generation. Sometimes that was very explicit, as when Bill Ayers decided that education rather than terrorism would now be the best way to bring about the revolution he and his fellow leftists so desired.

In the 90s, I was seeing the first indications of that, and it was already deeply-rooted. Now we are seeing it coming to fruition and dominating. The next decade will tell us whether there will be no return from it, or whether the backlash to it will build and will triumph.

Thinking of going on a cruise?

The New Neo Posted on by

Ed Driscoll reports on what it’s like in this age of still-existent COVID restrictions.

I’m certainly not racing out to do it.

And yet, for a short time right before COVID I was thinking of trying it. One of the attractions, for me, would be not having to keep packing and unpacking and instead staying in one room while moving from destination to destination. Another attraction would be the food, which would also be the drawback.

The basic idea would be to have a more relaxing vacation and yet see some sights and not just sit on a beach. But another drawback is that I prefer to wander around my travel destinations at leisure and be able to change plans if I’d like to stay in a certain place longer. In cruising, that’s not possible.

My parents used to love to cruise. But they usually went with four to eight other couples who were good friends. Cruising wasn’t their only mode of travel, but the reason they chose it was clear to me: they usually went in late February right before what was known in our house as tax season. My father was a lawyer and CPA, and March and April were his grinding months. Every evening after work he would come home, have dinner, and then get out his papers and work and work till bedtime. We weren’t supposed to disturb him, and we didn’t. The cruise was a way to relax and and store up energy for the coming push.

That was a long long time ago, in the days when many cruise ships left from piers on the west side of New York and there was no need to fly somewhere to begin the journey. It was also in the days when every night out of port people dressed up formally, in tuxedos and evening gowns. I’ve got the photos to prove it.

Quintez Brown ruined the narrative…

The New Neo Posted on by

…as well as his own chances to be elected to the Louisville City Council.

Then again, you never know about the latter. Voters can be very forgiving of little moral flaws, such as this shooting attempt in which Brown is the suspect:

On Monday morning, Louisville, KY, police responded to a call of an active shooter at the campaign headquarters of mayoral candidate Craig Greenberg. Greenberg, a Democrat, is one of 11 or so active candidates for that office.

It seems that shortly after 10 AM, someone entered Greenberg’s office and attempted to light him up with a 9mm pistol. Before fleeing the scene, the shooter fired four rounds at Greenberg, managing to put one round through Greenberg’s clothes.

Certain assumptions were made by some people, such as this one:

As I said, Brown didn’t fit that narrative:

Also:

In what may emerge as the most ironic part of this incident, in May 2021, [Quintez Brown] founded something called From Fields – to Arenas…with the mission of “providing political education and violence prevention training to youth engaged in Hip Hop and athletics.”

I don’t think that’s the most ironic part. I think that perhaps this is the most ironic part:

He also “worked as an opinion writer for the Louisville Courier-Journal” and was a proponent of gun control and as previously mentioned, a BLM activist. He also may have mental problems; last summer he went missing for eleven days, and when he was found his family issued this statement: “We are asking for privacy and would appreciate everyone’s patience and support while we tend to the most immediate need, which is Quintez’s physical, mental and spiritual needs.” So the issue of mental problems isn’t just being raised now, it was raised back then before he’d committed the crime.

Fortunately Greenberg seems fine and Brown is in custody, although my guess is he’ll probably get a light sentence. The larger problem is how those in charge act as though this sort of thing only happens on the right, which is absurd, and whenever it happens on the left it quickly goes down the memory hole.

Trudeau the tyrant…

The New Neo Posted on by

…isn’t all that popular these days. Maybe there’s hope for Canada yet:

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, amid collapsing domestic approval ratings, is witnessing full-scale abandonment in the provinces, which is taking place as he moves to implement martial law on Freedom Convoy protesters who simply want their basic human rights respected.

Quebec is the latest province to revolt from the Canadian prime minister’s vaccine passport policy, Keean Bexte reported. “Trudeau is alone,” Bexte remarked.

Well, probably not entirely alone. But certainly not solidly supported:

On Tuesday, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was mercilessly shouted down several times by parliament members as he attempted to answer their questions about his increasingly-authoritarian handling of the Trucker Convoy.

During the session, Trudeau mindlessly grasped his paper full of talking points, ignored the members’ questions completely, and parroted his carefully-crafted word salad of BS – which sent the room into an uproar.

The booing and heckling grew so loud that the speaker overseeing the house stepped in multiple times to restore order because Trudeau’s response had been completely drowned out.

What does it take in Canada for a vote of no-confidence to occur?

San Francisco recalls three extremely woke school board members

The New Neo Posted on by

On the surface – because it’s ultra-blue San Francisco – this seems like a surprising development:

San Francisco residents overwhelmingly approved of a vote Tuesday to recall three of the city’s school board members, election officials said.

Critics, including San Francisco Mayor London Breed, argued the members — school board President Gabriela López, Vice President Faauuga Moliga and Commissioner Alison Collins — pushed progressive politics rather than act in the best interest of children during the pandemic, and voters agreed, according to the San Francisco Department of Elections.

They agreed overwhelmingly, and the mayor – who is also on the left, but at least for the moment seems to have been more able to read the tea leaves of public opinion – gets to name their replacements until a new election next fall.

The message in Virginia and now in San Francisco is the same, even though those two places are not the same: if leftists go too far to harm children and their education, voters will revolt. The left and the Democrats rely heavily on the support of young women – many of whom are mothers – and such voters can be activated to vote against them if they perceive them as harming children.

Of course, the definition of what constitutes “harm” to children can differ from person to person, sometimes greatly, even among Democrat voters. San Francisco is a warning, however, that these sorts of decisions (especially during a pandemic) by a school board may cross a line:

Even the Democrat-led city government of San Francisco had enough with the board. It filed a lawsuit against both the SFUSD and its board in February 2021, accusing them of ” failing to come up with a reopening plan even as numerous other schools across the U.S. have reopened.” But SFUSD reopened only elementary schools last April and didn’t return to full-time in-person learning for all K-12 until fall 2021.

Board President López claimed the long delays didn’t cause any learning loss because children were “just having different learning experiences than the ones we currently measure,” and they learned more “about their families and cultures by staying home.” Her tone-deaf comments angered many parents, who have witnessed their kids’ academic and emotional struggles at home due to the school closures…

…In 2019, the board voted to cover a mural depicting slavery and Native Americans at George Washington High School, a decision that would cost taxpayers between $600,000 to $1 million. Fortunately, the mural will stay after a San Francisco Superior Court judge overturned the school board’s decision last year….

In January 2021, rather than focusing on reopening schools, the board voted to rename 44 schools, including Abraham Lincoln and George Washington High Schools. Even Democrat Mayor London Breed expressed her disbelief in a statement, saying, “I can’t understand why the school board is advancing a plan to rename all these schools when there isn’t a plan to have kids back in those physical schools.”

…Facing nationwide backlash over the renaming controversy, the school board voted to reverse its school renaming plan in April.

There is also anti-Asian bias. San Francisco is a city with demographics atypical of the US [emphasis mine]:

As of the 2010 census, the ethnic makeup and population of San Francisco included: 390,387 Whites (48.1%), 267,915 Asians (33.3%), 48,870 African Americans (6.1%), 4,024 Native Americans (0.5%), 3,359 Pacific Islanders (0.4%), 53,021 from other races (6.6%), and 37,659 from two or more races (4.7%). There were 121,744 Hispanics or Latinos of any race (15.1%).

And so when this occurred, a very sizeable percentage of the population was probably very upset, and rightly so [my emphasis]:

In the fall of 2020, the school board voted to eliminate the academic performance-based admission process to Lowell High school, one of the best high schools in the city.

It is important to note that Lowell’s admission process wasn’t 100 percent merit-based. Due to the San Francisco NAACP v. San Francisco Unified School District lawsuit and the 1983 Consent Decree settlement, there is a limit to the percentage of students from a particular ethnic group that can enroll at Lowell.

This cap means that, to get into Lowell, Chinese Americans have to score higher than any other ethnic group because Chinese American students represent a “disproportionate” share of students meeting the school’s requirements. Still, to justify canceling Lowell’s academic-based admission completely, board president Lopez claimed grades and test scores were “biased towards Whites and Asians,” even though non-white students make up 75 percent of Lowell’s student body. Collins tweeted that “‘merit’ is an inherently racist construct designed and centered on white supremacist framing.”

And those Asians are also white supremacists, as we’ve heard from leftists before:

…[P]eople uncovered some racially charged tweets by Collins from 2016, in which she blamed Asian-Americans for using “white supremacist thinking to assimilate and ‘get ahead.’” Several Asian-American voters told me that Collins’ racist tweets, her half-hearted apology, and her refusal to resign despite widespread criticism had motivated them to volunteer for the recall campaign.

No surprise there. Nor is this:

The three board members and their supporters claim the recall campaign was funded by right-wing big money. In truth, the recall campaign is a grassroots movement led by Asian Americans. Many of them are lifelong liberals, and some are first-generation immigrants who had never been politically active until last year.

The article goes on to describe some of their efforts. Because of pandemic restrictions, it took tremendous work to get the requisite number of signatures on recall petitions. But they were determined. Some of the leaders were immigrants from China, or the children of such immigrants (Asians of Chinese origin are by far the largest Asian group in San Francisco).

But most people – of any race, even in San Francisco – don’t want to see their children sacrificed on the non-holy altar of wokeness.

[NOTE: Actually, I see here that Collins’ tweets were even worse than that. Here’s a little sampler:

Prior to her election to the San Francisco Board of Education in 2018…[and] over the course of several tweets on December 4, 2016, Collins wrote:

“Many Asian [students] and [teachers] I know won’t engage in critical race convos unless they see how they’re impacted by white supremacy. … Many Asian Am. believe they benefit from the ‘model minority’ BS. In fact many Asian American [teachers], [students] and [parents] actively promote these myths. They use white supremacist thinking to assimilate and ‘get ahead’. Talk to many [Lowell High School] parents and you will hear praise of Tiger Moms and disparagement of Black/Brown ‘culture’. I even see it in my [Facebook] timeline with former [high school] peers. Their [timelines] are full of White Asian ppl. No recognition Black Lives Matter exists. 2 [weeks] ago, my mixed-race/Black daughter heard boys teasing a Latino about ‘Trump, Mexicans and the KKK.’ The boys were Asian-American. She spoke up when none of the other staff did. The after school counselor was Asian. Where are the vocal Asians speaking up against Trump? Don’t Asian Americans know they’re on his list as well? Do they think they won’t be deported? profiled? beaten? Being a house n****r [sic] is still being a n****r. You’re still considered ‘the help.'”

It’s hard to know where to begin to critique that. Let’s just say I find it interesting that Collins was elected to her position about two years after these tweets were published.]

Dreaming about blogging; on doxxing donors

The New Neo Posted on by

Lately there have been so many events that cry out for in-depth analysis that I often feel overwhelmed, and I think I’d feel that way even if my task was limited to reading about them – forget about trying to write something intelligent about them.

But blogging is voluntary, and apparently I choose to do it for some perverse reason.

Today I decided to revisit an old topic and to consolidate two past posts into one. I thought it would hardly take any time at all, but of course I had to find them and reread them and think about them and combine them and update them, and all of that took longer than expected.

So now I could write still another post on Trudeau’s tyrannical moves or on the newest Durham revelations, but I think that instead I’ll just say see this and this.

Last night I actually had a dream about blogging. I think that must be a first for me. In the dream I was in a room, a sort of large office, with some other bloggers. I was having tremendous trouble deciding where to set my computer up and then setting it at just the right height. A great deal of the dream was involved in this essentially boring setting-up process, and when I woke up I was astounded that I’d bothered to dream about such a tedious thing.

There also was a part of the dream in which I was talking to one of the bloggers and saying that even though I’m grateful for the internet, and that it’s a tremendous source of fascinating information, I’m worried that it’s also a tool for tyranny (something I’ve written about here). And then sure enough, today we have this completely and utterly predictable event:

After GoFundMe attempted to steal nearly $10 million in donated funds and give it to charities they liked better — leftwing “charities,” no doubt — people who wanted to donate to the Freedom Convoy truckers began using the GiveSendGo Christian alternative to GoFundMe.

The website was hacked, and redirected to another URL.

The donors’ information was leaked online. And then published on Twitter.

Note that while Twitter supposedly bans doxxing, it has permitted a leftwing disgraced former Canadian shock-jock nobody to continue posting the donors’ information with no penalty…

And now, Ezra Levant reports, the state media that Justin Trudeau pays — and which is in his pocket politically — is using the hacked dox materials as a hit list to intimidate the donors.

“BREAKING: Trudeau’s CBC state broadcaster is combing through the illegally hacked database of GiveSendGo donors, and emailing donors asking them to explain themselves.”

Just a little friendly journalism, right?

This sort of thing began quite some time ago. The turning point in my own awareness of it was when Brendon Eich of Mozilla was forced to resign in 2014 after it was revealed that he’d made a small donation to an anti-gay-marriage campaign in California back in 2008:

On Monday, OkCupid sent a message to visitors suggesting that they use browsers such as Microsoft Corp’s Internet Explorer or Google Inc’s Chrome: “Mozilla’s new CEO, Brendan Eich, is an opponent of equal rights for gay couples. We would therefore prefer that our users not use Mozilla software to access OkCupid.”

Eich, who invented JavaScript, apologized for causing “pain” and promised to promote equality for gay and lesbian individuals at Mozilla. However, the campaign continued to call for his ouster.

It may not have been the first instance of this happening to an individual because of a political donation he or she made, but it was a prominent one that underscored where we’d been heading. Now the practice has proliferated and become commonplace. The goal is of course intimidation in order to prevent groups the left doesn’t like from raising much money to support their causes. How many people have the courage to risk the exposure and its aftermath?

JFK assassination conspiracy theories and how they work

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE: Yesterday I noticed that there is a new entry in the JFK assassination conspiracy rolls. And then later, commenter “John Tyler” posted a link to it, wondering what to make of it. I gave a perfunctory answer, but then it occurred to me that it might be good to re-post some thoughts of mine on the subject of the JFK assassination and theories about it. The following is a slightly-edited version of two previous posts, one that first appeared here in June of 2011 and one in August of 2019. I think the information is valuable for its general discussion of how JFK conspiracy theories tend to work, and why some people find them persuasive.]

I’ve mentioned that Vincent Bugliosi’s book on JFK assassination conspiracy theories entitled Reclaiming History is very long, in part because it attempts to deal with every single one. Most people are not going to read the whole thing. But the first 500 pages or so are quite doable, often riveting, and present a ton of facts that in my opinion should be exceedingly convincing to those who attempt to take it all in objectively.

The rest of the book can be considered as a reference—and a handy one at that, since it is also available though Kindle, and a great deal of it is posted online for free at Google Books.

Since Bugliosi has pondered virtually every aspect of the Kennedy assassination and its conspiracy buffs, he’s pondered how they go about their business, and he has this to say (see pp. 951 ff) [emphasis mine]:

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.

Bugliosi is describing something I’ve noticed as well. There is indeed a mountain—or a forest, or whatever comparison you like—of solid evidence implicating Oswald, from a multiplicity of sources, such that it could not be planted simultaneously. There are countless witnesses to actions before and after the assassination, and that involve the murder of Officer Tippit as well. There are fingerprints. There are mail orders for firearms and fake IDs written in Owald’s handwriting and photos that are NOT faked (and that his widow attested to having taken herself—did she frame Oswald as well?).

There is an absence of all of this evidence for everyone else. All that is left is “well, this person talked to that person once” or “this person was acquainted with that person” or “this group had reason to want Kennedy dead,” and on and on and on. Tiny discrepancies—common to all prosecutions of all crimes that do not involve a video of the perpetrator committing the act and an uncoerced confession—are found and focused on. Witnesses might disagree on a detail here and there. Sometimes some change their story. Not every single fact is completely nailed down. But, as Bugliosi points out, the evidence for Oswald as the sole perpetrator is so enormously overwhelming that it has been proven not only beyond a reasonable doubt, but beyond a doubt.

However, doubting remains, and is extremely prevalent. A poll from 2003 indicated that 70% of Americans believe there was a conspiracy. The persistence of such ideas reflects, among other things, the fact that people are reluctant to believe that an insignificant individual such as Oswald could have committed an act that changed history. But it happens all the time—and, by the way, it was one of Oswald’s motivations: he wanted to change history and to turn his own insignificance into significance. They also play on the now-rampant – and rather justified – distrust of government and government agencies and institutions. .

Yet another reason for the prevalence of Kennedy assassination conspiracy theorists is that understanding a huge and unwieldy body of evidence is time-consuming and somewhat boring as well as difficult. Much easier to attempt to poke a hole in a fact or two (often misunderstanding or misinterpreting what a certain piece of evidence signifies) and/or at times to rely on outright lies or misrepresentations of what happened.

Bugliosi makes an especially interesting point in his introduction, one I hadn’t really thought of before, which is that although most of the people who believe in the various conspiracies are probably sincere in their beliefs, many of those who actually write the conspiracy books are not. They are lying and they know it, but they count on their readers not to realize this.

The Kennedy assassination involves an almost unimaginable amount of data and evidence, so much so that most of us have forgotten many of the details although we may think we remember them. Authors of conspiracy books—who generally are exceedingly familiar with these details—are counting on their readers’ faulty or incomplete memories.

On pages xxviii-xxix of the introduction to his book, Bugliosi points out:

The conspiracy theorists [most of those who originate and profit off them, that is] are so outrageously brazen that they tell lies not just about verifiable, documentary evidence, but about clear, photographic evidence, knowing that only one out of a thousand of their readers, if that, is in possession of the subject photographs. Robert Groden (the leading photographic expert for the conspiracy proponents who was the photographic adviser the Oliver Stone’s movie JFK) draws a diagram on page 24 of his book High Treason of Governor Connally seated directly in front of President Kennedy in the presidential limousine and postulates the “remarkable path” a bullet coming from behind Kennedy, and traveling from left to right, would have to take to hit Connally—after passing straight through Kennedy’s body, making a right turn and then a left one in midair, which, the buffs chortle, bullets “don’t even do in cartoons.” What average reader would be in a position to dispute this seemingly common-sense, geometric assault on the Warren Commission’s single-bullet theory?…But of course, if you start out with an erroneous premise, whatever flows from it makes a lot of sense. The only problem is that it’s wrong. The indisputable fact here—which all people who have studied the assassination know—is that Connally was not seated directly in front of Kennedy, but to his left front.

Bugliosi goes on to add that Connally’s jump seat was also three inches lower than Kennedy, and his head was turned to his right (which is clear from the Zapruder film) at the time the bullet hit. The proper trajectory of the bullet was therefore exactly as the Warren Commission stated. None of these facts are all that difficult to ascertain, and there is little doubt that conspiracy author and consultant Groden is (or should be) well aware of them. And this is just a single point on which conspiracists prevaricate; there are countless others.

Bugliosi continues [emphasis mine]:

I am unaware of any other major event in world history which has been shrouded in so much intentional misinformation as has the assassination of JFK.

The question is why? Bugliosi notes that conspiracy sells, and he is correct. There is no question that some of the motivation to write these things is to make money. But for at least some of the conspiracy authors and promoters there is probably another reason, which is that belief in conspiracies undermine faith in our government as a whole. Earl Warren had this to say about the matter (page xxi of the introduction):

To say now that [the FBI, CIA, Secret Service, and Departments of State and Defense], as well as the [Warren] Commission, suppressed, neglected to unearth, or overlooked evidence of a conspiracy would be an indictment of the entire government of the United States. It would mean the whole structure was absolutely corrupt from top to bottom, not one person of high or low rank willing to come forward to expose the villainy, in spite of the fact that the entire country bitterly mourned the death of its young president.

To add some thoughts based on events that have occurred since then, Russiagate and then the exposure of Russiagate has only underlined the believability of the idea that the government (“deep state”) did something as crooked and awful as killing Kennedy. In Russiagate, we saw a false conspiracy theory pushed about Trump by certain government agencies (or at least people in those agencies who were quite high up), and then we saw that conspiracy theory about Trump and Russia unravel as evidence was presented for the very real conspiracy against Trump by those agencies. Which theory one believes is true should be based on the facts and the clarity and abundance and convincing nature of the evidence, and I think it’s clear that Russiagate was false and the Russia Hoax was conspiracy to promote a false conspiracy (something like the authors of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion). But most Democrats probably still disagree with me, and see the reverse (Russiagate was true and its undermining was false) as quite obvious. I think the evidence is absolutely overwhelming for the side in which I have come to believe, but the others of course disagree, whether they’re even aware of that evidence or not.

And the entire episode only fosters the general idea of government conspiracies on conspiracies on conspiracies.

From my reading of Oswald’s testimony and demeanor, he was well aware that he would be championed and/or exonerated by those who would want to believe him innocent. His famous “I am a patsy” remark was a brilliant statement along those lines. Bugliosi’s book explains that Oswald maintained a resistance to police interrogation that was impressive; he virtually never lost his imperturbable demeanor during the time he was in custody. When confronted with clear evidence of his guilt, he calmly and arrogantly denied whatever implicated him, no matter how powerfully it did so. When asked, for example, to explain a fact that pointed strongly to his guilt, he merely answered, “I don’t explain it” (page 255).

Perhaps Oswald correctly surmised that others would do his explaining for him.

[NOTE II: I’ve limited this post to the question of JFK’s assassination, but the same arguments are true for Ruby’s killing of Oswald – absolutely overwhelming mountain of evidence, and good explanations for whatever may superficially look like a flaw in the argument.

And regarding the book Reclaiming History, to those who point out that Bugliosi has written some rather sketchy books on other topics, my answer is that while this indeed may be so (I haven’t read those), on this one – which I have read – he is both exhaustive and accurate. That is because it is in his wheelhouse, the prosecution of a criminal act, whereas the sketchy ones are not (one, for example, is about Bush being guilty of war crimes, which is not in Bugliosi’s field of expertise as an LA deputy district attorney). I have read Bugliosi’s Helter Skelter, about the Manson murder case which he had prosecuted; it is an excellent book on the subject.]