* The JFK assassination conspiracy stories represented something of the zenith of American conspiracy thinking. In the end, there was never anything resembling a case for such a conspiracy, but the exercise did provide insights into the defects of conspiracy thinking. In recent decades, conspiracy thinking mutated into endless dead ends, dissipating all the while, and is now slowly returning to the background noise from which it came.
* Although public interest in JFK assassination conspiracy stories has now faded to negligible levels, conspiracy paranoids continue to belabor the matter, oblivious to the difficulties posed by their claims: How could anyone believe such a thing on such thin evidence? Who could believe such a conspiracy could be kept secret? Wouldn't credible witnesses have come forward by now? What government scandal hasn't had its loud whistle-blowers?
Conspiracy paranoids like to postulate that the "plot" was really only known to a handful of "insiders", with the actions delegated to people who had no idea of the real significance of what they were doing. The problem here is that, following the assassination, a good number of these people would then realize that actions they had performed that didn't quite make sense at the time would suddenly fall into place in a shocking fashion, and they would have a strong inclination to tell the Warren Commission what they knew -- not merely from outrage, but because they might end up being accused of complicity themselves, or even silenced.
Conspiracy paranoids still claim that it would have been possible to conceal the conspiracy, pointing to various government plots that actually did take place and were concealed. One brought up on occasion is the Manhattan Project, the US effort to develop the atom bomb during World War II, but it's hardly a very good example. People knew there was a facility at Los Alamos, New Mexico, that was doing something very secret; what it was doing was kept secret for less than four years, and the secret was only kept because of the widespread, unconcealed, and generally accepted censorship in place during the war years. When Missouri Senator Harry Truman, in charge of a Senate committee to monitor war contracts, started to check into the money trail of the project, he was told it was a deep black secret, and he shouldn't pry into it. He didn't. Truman was elected as Franklin Roosevelt's vice-president in 1944, and when Roosevelt died in 1945, Truman knew effectively nothing about the atomic bomb project.
In other words, the Manhattan Project was only kept a secret because no Americans were in a position or inclined to play snoop and make any serious effort to find out what was going on at Los Alamos -- and once the atom bomb was dropped on Japan in August 1945, everyone knew what had been going on there, if not in specific detail. The Soviets even had the details; in 1945, President Truman told Soviet dictator Josef Stalin that the Americans had a new and powerful weapon, to find Stalin puzzlingly uninterested. That was because Stalin knew all about the project, there being at least three Red spies at Los Alamos. The first Soviet atom bomb, detonated in 1949, was a copy of the US "Fat Man" bomb. Some secrecy.
Conspiracy paranoids are more fond of pointing to a CIA program codenamed MKULTRA, established by the agency in the 1950s to investigate "mind control" using drugs, hypnosis, and other means, not necessarily with the consent or knowledge of the experimental subjects. The results were sometimes disastrous; in the most notorious case, in 1953 a CIA employee named Frank Olson committed suicide after being given LSD. Incidentally, some of the conspiracy paranoids have suggested MKULTRA produced tools that allowed the CIA to "brainwash" Oswald into shooting JFK, though the details of when and how this was done remain unclear.
MKULTRA came to light during the investigations of a Senate committee headed by Idaho Senator Frank Church in 1975, and was thoroughly investigated by the Senate in 1977. MKULTRA remains controversial, with the agency's critics saying the CIA deliberately destroyed records and never admitted the full extent of the program. Even if all the accusations are true, however, the MKULTRA conspiracy is a weak model for a "military-industrial complex" conspiracy to kill JFK. MKULTRA was conducted in secrecy by the agency and did not involve other organizations. There was never much of a "conspiracy story" about MKULTRA; outsiders weren't aware of the program and were not trying to investigate it, and when they did become aware of it, they quickly turned up piles of dirt.
Indeed, it's hard to think that a detailed investigation of any organization, or for that matter any individual, wouldn't turn up some dirt. That is certainly the case for, say, presidential candidates, who are guaranteed to have all their sins, even the most trivial, played up to the public in bright lights by their opponents.
* Conspiracy paranoids like to run lists of verified conspiracies such as MKULTRA -- but an examination of the items on such lists shows they are, if not molehills, certainly not towering mountains that would be very hard to conceal. A better model of an assassination conspiracy, more approximating a mountain, would be the "Iran-Contra" scandal that embarrassed the Reagan Administration -- in which the US sold weapons under the table to the Islamic Republic of Iran, in defiance of America's own arms embargo against the country, in hopes of obtaining the release of American hostages held in Lebanon. The funds obtained were then covertly funneled to the "Contra" rebels fighting the Leftist Nicaraguan government.
The Iran-Contra affair had very much the sound of a classic conspiracy tale -- a complicated plot spanning the world and conducted in secret by the authorities in deliberate disregard of their own rules. However, the Iran-Contra trickery was caught in the act, and as the details unfolded in the course of investigation, it came across as about as devious as a chimpanzee piling up boxes to reach a bunch of bananas, with the prime movers appearing more clueless than clever under testimony.
Anybody reviewing the Iran-Contra plot would conclude it was so slipshod that it was certain to be busted; the government, supposedly so efficient at covering the tracks of its conspiracies, dropped the ball in keeping that one under wraps. Even worse, government investigation of the matter, instead of covering things up, worked energetically to get to the dirty truth of the matter, though Reagan was able to disavow knowledge -- probably legitimately, presidents having some good reason to take a distant management approach to secret actions conducted on their watch: "Don't bother me about the details." Reagan was an entirely hands-off manager in the first place.
The obvious bumbling of the Iran-Contra plot highlights the puzzling mindset of conspiracy paranoids, in that they see a world where accidents, mixups, misunderstandings, bureaucracy, bungling, laziness, and sheer stupidity don't exist. They often accuse doubters of conspiracy claims of complacency, of refusing to consider the possibility of conspiracy, of mindless acceptance of the government line. In reality, nobody with any sense trusts the government without condition. The difference of opinion not over whether the government is entirely trustworthy -- but over the assertion that the government could be competent enough to pull off a grand conspiracy, and not get caught sooner rather than later. Most people who work for the government would the last to believe any such thing.
A "military-industrial complex" plot to kill JFK would have been much harder to pull off than the Iran-Contra scheme, since it would have involved so many more players -- and worse for the conspiracy, the assassination of a president would necessarily receive the full glare of public scrutiny, with legions of snoops looking into the matter from day one. They've been looking for decades, and have found nothing of substance.
In fact, the conspiracy community cannot point to a single one of the long list of JFK assassination conspiracy stories they've been peddling that has led to any evidence of substance. While there have been hidden conspiracies and there have been revealed conspiracies, conspiracy tales start out on the wrong foot from the outset. If there are things going on, as conspiracy paranoids insist, that we don't know anything about, then we can't say anything about them. People do build conspiracy tales on sheer guesswork, but it's along the lines of shooting aimlessly in the dark, claiming as valid targets anyone who gets hit.
There's also no story once the conspiracy's cover is blown, the evidence piling up rapidly after that happens. A conspiracy story necessarily exists in a phantom domain of inconclusive evidence -- but credibly establishing the existence of a far-reaching conspiracy demands a high level of proof. The longer the evidence remains inconclusive, the less plausible the story becomes. Eventually the authorities stop paying attention to it, the news media loses interest in it except as an item of curiosity or mockery, and it ends up doing nothing more than circulating through the conspiracy sphere -- until everyone who actually remembers the relevant incident passes away, with the conspiracy tale then filed away in the dead rumor office.
The difficulty with conspiracy stories is not that they claim there's a giant elephant in the room, that a conspiracy exists -- but that the elephant is invisible. Everyone believes in elephants, it's invisible elephants that are the difficulty, elephants being a little hard to miss. Criminals generally leave traces of their actions, and a big gang of them leaves elephant-sized footprints.
If it is claimed the conspiracy was covered up, that is effectively admitting the invisibility of the elephant, that people really can't see it, and the evidence isn't very convincing. Worse, the alleged coverup only implies a bigger conspiracy that would be even harder to keep invisible. In its limit, such extension of conspiracy postulates an all-powerful secret authoritarian government pulling the strings from behind the scenes. The problem is that people who live under blatantly authoritarian regimes are painfully aware of the fact, being given continuous reminders by the security apparatus, and it's nothing that resembles a secret. If there is a tyrannical order actually running everything, why would it be so unwilling to visibly exercise its power? If it had the power, it would not be constrained from using it, and if it was, it is very hard to understand how everyone would fail to notice.
* As an instructional tale of what the conspiracy community has actually accomplished, consider the case of a British lad named Gary McKinnon, a UFO enthusiast who decided in the mid-1990s that the US government was "covering up" information about UFO technologies that, if disclosed by McKinnon, would solve the energy crisis and many of the world's other problems. McKinnon heroically decided to start hacking into US government computer systems. As detailed by reporter Jon Ronson of THE GUARDIAN newspaper in 2009:
QUOTE:
With a joint in the ashtray and a can of Foster's [Ale] next to the mousepad, he hacked NASA, the Pentagon, and every US military installation he could get into. It was, he says, incredibly easy. He wrote a script that searched for network administrators who'd been too lazy to change their user names from "user name" and their passwords from "password". And when he found one he was in ...
He spent between five and seven years roaming the corridors of power like the Invisible Man, wandering into Pentagon offices, rifling through files, and he found no particular smoking gun about anything. He unearthed nothing to suggest a US involvement in 9/11, nothing to suggest a UFO cover-up. Nothing ... except two things.
"I found a list of officers' names ... under the heading 'Non-Terrestrial Officers'. I looked it up and it's nowhere. I don't think it means little green men. What I think it means is not Earth-based. What I saw made me believe that they have some kind of spaceship, off planet ... I was smoking a lot of dope at the time. Not good for the intellect."
The other thing he said he saw towards the end of his hacking adventures ... was a photograph of a smooth, spherical object in a file at the [NASA] Johnson Space Centre that "might have been a UFO but was probably a satellite".
END_QUOTE
McKinnon got cocky, leaving taunts behind in his raids on computer systems, and was busted in 2002, leading to a lengthy trans-Atlantic squabble over his legal status. In 2012, the British government finally decided not to extradite him to the US, and had no intent of trying him in the UK; the controversy then ended. The lessons of the matter here, of course, are that government secrecy is nowhere near as bullet-proof as conspiracy paranoids claim it is, and that there may be much less to be found behind the barrier than they think there is.
Some might suggest that the conspiracy would make sure records weren't left behind where people like McKinnon could ever get at them. However, that leads to the circular game of basing arguments not on evidence, but on absence of evidence. The straightforward explanation for why nothing has been found is because there is nothing there to find.
* If there is still an insistence that there are facts in the case of the JFK assassination that remain unknown, then why draw the line there? It is an historical fact that on 14 April 1865, John Wilkes Booth shot Abraham Lincoln in the back of the head with a 0.44 caliber Philadelphia deringer, which was recovered and is now on display at Ford's Theater in Washington DC.
But wait -- how can we be so sure that Booth owned the deringer, and that it was used for the assassination? Was such a puny, highly inaccurate and, by modern standards, crude weapon capable of doing the job? Booth was an actor; where did he acquire the skills to handle a firearm? Can we prove how Booth obtained the deringer? Do we know where he bought the ammunition?
Nobody investigating Lincoln's assassination could fail to notice how many unanswered questions it raises. Did Booth actually buy a different model of deringer? Were there other deringers with the same serial number? Did somebody alter the serial numbers on Booth's deringer? What about the chain of custody of the deringer? Was a different weapon actually used, and the deringer swapped later? Could the data from Lincoln's autopsy have been faked to cover up the use of another weapon? How many shots were really fired? Did anyone actually see Booth go into the theater with the deringer? Could it have been a "Booth double" and not really Booth who pulled the trigger? What about Booth's shadowy contacts with Confederate agents? Could he have been mesmerized into killing the president?
Given such uncertainties about the case against Booth, it is obvious that if he had been captured alive, his case would have never gone to trial. It must be regarded as extremely suspicious that the soldiers pursuing him shot and killed him; it would have been very inconvenient for him to have lived to take the witness stand. The coverup continues even today; we'll never really know the truth about the Lincoln assassination.
BACK_TO_TOP* While JKF assassination conspiracy stories dominated the conspiracy discussion, such as it was, through the turn of the century, of course many lesser conspiracy tales made the rounds. UFO conspiracy stories remained common, ticking up on occasion when a popular UFO movie hit the theaters, notably Steven Spielberg's 1977 CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND.
From 1993 to 2002, ignoring some intermittent follow-on work later, there was also a hit TV show titled THE X-FILES, which ran episodes about the unexplained, the supernatural, and monsters -- but which had a underlying theme about a cover alien invasion of Earth, in collusion with the US government. That period of time roughly paralleled the emergence of the internet, along with the USENET global bulletin board system.
USENET provided a system that anyone could use to spread conspiracy stories and other disinformation all over the world. Early on, the most prominent disinformation tale peddled on USENET was "Holocaust denial", the claim that Hitler's extermination of the Jewry and other "undesireables" never actually happened, the story being a fabrication. More specific conspiracy stories also circulated, among the more noteworthy being "secret black helicopters", "faked Moon landing", "satanic day care centers", and "chemtrails".
President Bill Clinton's presidential administration during the 1990s also got its fair share of abuse -- most prominently over the death of Vince Foster, an administration staffer who committed suicide in a park in the Washington DC area in 1993. All circumstantial evidence and investigations showed he had shot himself, but conspiracy paranoids refused to believe it was that easy. Foster's suicide led to the creation of a "mysterious deaths" list targeting Bill Clinton and his wife Hillary, though the list would never amount to anything but a nuisance.
At a higher level, the 1990s also saw the emergence of public concerns over climate change, most specifically demonstrated by the creation of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), established by the United Nations in 1988. The IPCC was set up to review climate-change science to help governments understand the challenge, with the first report issued in 1990. Conspiracy paranoids put the IPCC at the top of the target list -- saying climate change was a hoax, that the IPCC and climate researchers were enabling a fraud to push a Leftist social agenda.
In 1999, the emerging internet conspiracy cult got a leader of sorts, when ultra-conspiracy paranoid Alex Jones established the INFOWARS website, Jones would prove highly prolific, generating conspiracy stories and videos with little connection to reality, acquiring a large audience in doing so.
* Jones was in the right place at the right time. On 11 September 2001, a group of 19 Islamic terrorist of the al-Qaeda faction hijacked four jetliners on morning flights, crashing two of them into the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in New York City, leading to their collapse.
A third plane was flown into the Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia, while the fourth plane, United Flight 93, crashed into a field in Pennsylvania after the passengers took on the terrorists. Almost 3,000 people, including all the people on the jetliners, were killed. The attack led to the US invasion of Afghanistan, where al-Qaeda had its facilities, and a manhunt for Osama bin Laden, the head of the group, who was finally killed ten years later.
The important thing here, however, is that the "9-11" attacks spawned a dedicated conspiracy movement, saying the attacks were actually orchestrated, or at least were allowed to happen, by the US government to provide justification for intervention in Afghanistan and later Iraq. There were many variations on this story, with different players and different rationales -- but they all agreed that al-Qaeda was at best a "useful tool" of the conspiracy, if al-Qaeda was even involved at all.
The primary technical justification for the 9-11 conspiracy story was that the Trade Towers collapsed straight down, instead of toppling over into Manhattan -- with the claim made that they were actually destroyed by a controlled demolition, explosive charges having been planted in the structures beforehand. Other suggestions were that the Pentagon had actually been attacked by a cruise missile, not a jetliner; the jetliners were flown by remote control; and the jetliner passengers were not on board when the impacts occurred.
Studies were performed by the US National Institute of Standards & Technology (NIST) and POPULAR MECHANICS magazine that easily debunked all the conspiracy claims, while the US government's "9/11 Commission" reviewed all the available data, also rejecting a conspiracy. As it turns out, a giant tall building that is mostly air really can only fall straight down -- and setting up a controlled demolition is complicated, it couldn't have been done unobserved by the people in the Trade Towers.
Conspiracy paranoids of course tried to poke holes in the official narrative, for example cooking up stories about how the controlled demolition was set up in perfect secrecy. The bottom line was still the same: nobody who worked in the Trade Towers who survived 9-11 recollected any mysterious preparations ahead of the incident, and invoking "perfect secrecy" was an effective admission there was no evidence of such preparations.
In any case, a number of organizations were set up to investigate "9-11 Truth" including "Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth" and "Scholars for 9-11 Truth & Justice". Incidentally, the 9-11 conspiracy movement led to the use of the term "Truther / Troother" for a conspiracy paranoid. A large number of texts and videos were generated to establish the "Truth" -- with something of a peak in 2011, the tenth anniversary of 9-11, and then the subject gradually fading into the conspiracy background noise.
* One of the ongoing elements in that background noise was Alex Jones and INFOWARS. Jones took particular note of an incident that took place on 14 December 2012 in Newtown, Connecticut -- when 20-year-old Adam Lanza shot and killed his mother, then went to the Sandy Hook Elementary School and killed 26 more people, including 20 children aged six and seven, along with six adult staff members. When police showed up, Lanza committed suicide. Although there had been school mass shootings before Sandy Hook and there would be many more afterward, Sandy Hook would be one of the most prominent, sparking mass outrage, which unfortunately did little to halt school shootings.
Of note in the current context is that Alex Jones claimed the assault was a "false flag" operation, orchestrated by the government to push gun control; that nobody was killed; and all the parents of the kids who had been killed were "crisis actors" -- with the result that the parents were persistently threatened and victimized by those who bought what Jones was selling. The conspiracy story he put together was entirely normal for him, but in this case the victims decided to fight back. Jones would see the parents in court.
At roughly the same time, the Russians began to become assertive on social-media sites like Twitter and Facebook. The Russians had been an unpleasant presence on the internet for years, but now they began to "troll" social media, generally with automated "bot" accounts. The bots spread propaganda, conspiracy stories, and other disinformation -- which was further amplified by social media "algorithms" that promoted the most lurid and sensationalistic postings, since they got the most attention. Social-media "influencers" who got large numbers of "followers" could monetarize their accounts and make cash off the hysteria.
The exercise was directed by the Russian "Internet Research Agency (IRA)", a "troll factory" in Saint Petersburg. The rise of Russian cyber-operations was paralleled by a rise in efforts to fight back, particularly in the Baltic States, Finland, and other places in Eastern Europe.
BACK_TO_TOP* The ongoing flow of conspiracy stories online picked up pace in 2016, when New York City property mogul Donald Trump ran for President of the United States against Hillary Clinton. There was never a dirtier political campaign, with Trump making enthusiastic use of disinformation, including conspiracy tales, to smear Clinton -- with leaked documents weaponized against her. In this effort, he was heavily assisted by the Russian troll operation, which amplified every accusation, indifferent to its credibility, while the Russians also provided leaked documents damaging to the Clinton campaign.
One of the earliest conspiracy stories to make the rounds concerned the murder of Seth Rich, a 27-year-old Democratic National Committee (DNC) staffer who was gunned down on the streets of Washington DC in the early morning of 10 July 2016. Investigators concluded that Rich was the victim of a botched robbery, with some similarity to other incidents that had taken place in the area where the killing took place. Trump-loving conspiracy paranoids insisted that Rich had got the goods on the DNC and he was killed to prevent him from talking. Rich's parents issued a public letter pleading with the conspiracy paranoids to stop exploiting their son's death, but it was ignored.
In the end, Trump won the election -- just barely, losing the popular vote but winning the electoral vote. That was not really good news for him, since he had only run for president as a promotional stunt to make money, and hadn't expected to win. He had no ability to do the job, or had any real interest in it; after a period of adjustment, he simply adapted his aggressive promotionalism to the presidency, with a focus on advancing his self-interests.
Trump's ongoing bluster included claims that he had actually won the 2016 popular election, but that the Democrats had stolen it by enlisting huge numbers of illegal aliens -- Trump's presidential campaign had been heavily driven by demonizing illegals -- to vote. There was no evidence for the claim. a claim for which there was no evidence. He went so far as to establish a "Voter Fraud Commission" to investigate -- but it had to be disbanded in the face of protests, and the refusal of all but a handful of states to cooperate with it, calling it an invasion of privacy of the citizens of those states. Trump would play the "Voter Fraud" card again.
In the meantime, a conspiracy story known as "PizzaGate", which had been introduced even before the election, was making the rounds, in which the Democratic Party in general and Hillary Clinton in particular were running a Satanic child sex ring -- one locus being the Comet Ping Pong pizzeria in Washington DC, which led to harassment and threats of the staff there -- and an incident in December 2016, in which one Edgar Welch, determined to "rescue the children", went into the pizzeria with an assault rifle and shot it up. Nobody was hurt and Welch surrendered to the police; he was eventually sentenced to four years in prison.
* Pizzagate soon evolved into a more convoluted conspiracy story, named "Q-Anon". It started out on the "4chan" message board, noted for extremist content, to later migrate to the similar "8chan" message board. The premise was that readers were being given secret information by an anonymous government official known only as "Q". The message was that liberals were involved in a pedophile, satanic, and cannibalistic cult that intended to rise up against Donald Trump -- but Trump was planning to crush the "uprising" on a day called "the Storm" or "the Event".
There was absolutely no factual basis for any of it, it was a complete fantasy. In fact, there was some thought that QAnon had basically started out as a gag, playing the game of: Can you top this?! QAnon was a blenderized mishmosh of pro-Trump conspiracy stories that mutated on almost a daily basis. It became a furtive political movement of sorts, with Trump-aligned extremists occasionally playing up the letter "Q" to mark their intent. Social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter gradually began to shut down QAnon accounts on their services.
By the spring of 2020, the global COVID-19 pandemic, which had originated in the Chinese city of Wuhan, began to take hold in the USA. Trump fell into the pattern of minimizing the danger and attempting to play the pandemic up as a hoax -- while simultaneously blaming all of its ill effects on his political enemies, with Trump going so far as to encourage attacks on his administration's own health officials. He also encouraged a conspiracy story claiming the pandemic got started out of leak from a biolab in Wuhan -- when all the professionals believed it got started in a live-animal market, and the Chinese government said there was no evidence of a lab-leak origin. None was ever found.
Of course, when vaccines were introduced to fight the pandemic, they were denounced -- in the footsteps of paranoia over vaccines that well predated fluoridation of water supplies. It was in this chaotic environment that Trump ran for re-election in the fall of 2020, being challenged by Joe Biden, previously a senator and vice president. Trump lost the election by a clear margin -- but he then played the "Voter Fraud" card again, coupled to a furtive scheme to cheat the vote, and absolutely refused to cooperate with the transition to the Biden Administration. Gradually, the "Voter Fraud" claims were dismissed in court, and Trump was forced to vacate the White House.
Trump wasn't done, however. He organized a rally in Washington DC for 6 January 2021, the day Congress would certify the election results. A crowd assembled on that day; Trump warned them their freedoms were at risk, and in the end they went over to the Capitol Building and sacked the place, gang-fighting with the police and sending Members of Congress in flight. Trump observed the event on TV and only told them once the dust began to settle: "Go home. We love you."
* It was at this time that the tottering cult of conspiracy began to fall apart. Many of the Capitol rioters were QAnon followers -- including one Ashli Babbitt, who was shot and killed by the Capitol Police when she tried to break through a door. Some of those involved in the effort to cheat the vote were also QAnon followers. In any case, with mass arrests following the riot, the Q postings stopped and QAnon followers kept a low profile. They didn't disappear, in fact some of them went into Congress, but they tried to cover their tracks.
News media that had played the "Voter Fraud" card against makers of voting machines were hit with and lost major lawsuits. Of course, Donald Trump found himself the target of a huge and necessarily slow-moving criminal investigation -- complicated by the fact that he had been president and had some degree of constitutional protection.
Public interest in and acceptance of conspiracy stories, which had been in decline, began to fade out. QAnon was seen as lunacy at best, criminal treason at worst. In 2022, as a particularly noticeable sign of the decline of the conspiracy cult, Alex Jones was ordered by the courts to pay almost a billion dollars to the Sandy Hook families for spreading vicious rumors about them. Collecting proved difficult, but his INFOWARS site was shut down in late 2024. Ironically, INFOWARS was bought up at auction by THE ONION, which planned to use the website to satirize conspiracy paranoids.
Also in 2022, billionaire Elon Musk bought up Twitter; he proceeded to turn it into a safe haven for trolls, with bots eventually taking over. That was flying in the face of efforts being made to leash in social media. Individual governments had been working to that end for years, but it wasn't until 2023, when the European Union's "Digital Services Act (DSA)" went into operation, that major weight was applied. The DSA provided a comprehensive set of regulations covering online services in general, but it also required major social-media players to submit moderation plans, or suffer penalties. The DSA was on a collision course with Elon Musk, and he was going to lose.
However, the downward trajectory of the conspiracy cult became confused when Trump -- in spite of his assault on the Capitol Building -- was re-elected as president in 2024. Exactly where things go from there remains uncertain, but it seems unlikely the cult of conspiracy will benefit.
BACK_TO_TOP* I wrote a long document, with 35 chapters, on the JFK assassination, but it ended up being way too much for many readers, and so I built this short document in 2012 to give the basic facts of the case. In 2015, I was working on an update of the long parent document, to then realize it was a waste of effort: Nobody sane is worried about the JFK assassination today, nobody reads this document, and it's a useless bore to wade through.
I decided to file away the long document, and extend this simple document with a quick tour of the conspiracy game -- working on a "three strikes you're out" basis, dismantling some of the most prominent claims, and pointing out the rest have no better basis in facts. In 2024, I decided to add front and end essays to place the JFK assassination conspiracy stories in context, and to point to the ultimate failure of conspiracy paranoia. It's not dead yet, and it will probably linger for a long time as a shade of its former self. As for all the other conspiracy stories mentioned here, none of them are credible enough to be worth debunking.
If it's not obvious, I refuse to use the terms "conspiracy theory" or "conspiracy theorist" if I don't absolutely have to. "Making stuff up" -- out of partial or whole cloth -- does not a "theory" make; call it a "conspiracy story" or "conspiracy tale" or "conspiracy hoax" instead. In the same way, instead of "conspiracy theorist", we need to say "conspiracy paranoid" or "conspiracy troll" or "conspiracy kook".
* The primary sources for this document were Gerald Posner's CASE CLOSED and Bugliosi's RECLAIMING HISTORY. Other useful sources included:
* Illustrations details:
* Revision history:
v1.0.0 / 01 feb 12 / Originally THE KENNEDY ASSASSINATION IN BRIEF. v1.0.1 / 01 mar 13 / Review & polish. v1.0.1 / 01 nov 13 / Review & polish. v1.0.2 / 01 oct 15 / Review & polish. v2.0.0 / 01 aug 15 / Went to two chapters. v3.0.0 / 01 jul 17 / Changed title to THE RISE & FALL OF JFK TRUTH. v3.0.1 / 01 jun 19 / Review & polish. v3.0.2 / 01 apr 21 / Review & polish. v3.0.3 / 01 feb 23 / Review & polish. v4.0.0 / 01 dec 24 / Added front & end essays, 3 chapters, retitled.BACK_TO_TOP
