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Transcript:
I first got involved in the “skeptical community” in the early 2000s, and at that time one of the biggest conspiracy theories that needed debunking was 9/11 truthers–people who were convinced that it wasn’t as simple as terrorists hijacking a few planes and crashing them into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Their “theories” varied, and went from “the Bush administration knew about the attack but let it happen,” to “Bush ordered the attack,” to “Bush ordered the attack and knew airplanes weren’t enough to bring down the towers so he had them wired with bombs,” to (I swear I’m not making this up) “there were no planes at all, those were just projections, and the buildings were all just blown up with bombs.”
Somehow that was more believable to a lot of people than the truth, which is that sure, Bush DID do 9/11 in a way but it was by participating in and furthering the United States’ global imperialism, as presciently detailed in Chalmer Johnson’s seminal work, “Blowback: the costs and consequences of American empire,” published in 2001. But sure, ghost planes and secret bombs make sense, too.
Older skeptics at the time warned me that no matter how thoroughly we debunk these ideas, decades in the future there will be people who simply take the conspiracy at face value, and they knew that because they saw it happen with the OG US traumatic event: the assassination of John F. Kennedy.
Conspiracy theories started popping up pretty soon after JFK was killed, much like with 9/11 and for a lot of the same reasons: it was a big, scary event that was simply unthinkable before it happened, and it completely upset any feeling of normalcy in American society. So it’s understandable that people would wonder if there must be something more to it, something that makes more sense, something that we might have more control over, something that is somehow less scary. One lone lunatic can’t possibly just take out the leader of the free world, right? It must have been the Russians, or the Cubans, or the Mafia, or the CIA.
But it wasn’t. Authorities knew that they had to rule out those possibilities, especially the ones that might escalate to a nuclear war. Lyndon Johnson established the Warren Commission to investigate the assassination, led by the chair, Chief Justice Earl Warren (hence the name). The investigation, along with several other official investigations, came to the conclusion that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone when he shot and killed JFK. More than 60 years later, historians and other experts agree.
And as my old friends said, it doesn’t matter, because most Americans still think there was some conspiracy. And in fact, the reason why I decided to bring up this otherwise tired topic is because a few months back I mentioned that I enjoy watching The Majority Report with Sam Seder here on YouTube, and apparently I have a curse upon me so when I shout out other creators in my videos, inevitably those creators will say or do something irrational, antiscience, or embarrassing. I think I’ll call it The Hosseneffect.
Anyway, here’s a Majority Report clip I saw the other day, featuring Emma Vigland and I think Matt Binder (apologies if I got his name wrong but the description doesn’t mention who it is).
So, I would honestly not be super bothered by this had it just been these two saying “well maybe, who knows! The CIA has done lots of shady stuff, so what if…!” Because yes, a majority of Americans reject historians’ consensus and believe that there was some kind of grander conspiracy behind JFK’s assassination, so it would be understandable if these cohosts just didn’t do the research. But the confidence with which they announce that only naive college educated white people believe something so silly…something that is, in fact, reality…I’m sorry, as boring as I find JFK conspiracy theories, I can’t let that go unchallenged.
They’re a bit vague on what they think the conspiracy is, which is always the advantage of being a conspiracy theorist–there’s always a fallback or alternate explanation if something is debunked. For instance, someone might believe there was a second shooter because the bullet couldn’t have changed direction to hit both JFK and the man in front of him, Texas Governor John Connally, but when you point out that they were sitting offset enough to allow one bullet to hit them both, they can say actually Oswald acted alone but he was hired by someone. If you show that it’s ridiculously unlikely he was hired by the Mafia, they can say actually it was Russia, and on and on and on.
So please do not expect this video to be a thorough explanation of why historians and experts have an extremely high confidence that Oswald acted alone with no input from a larger conspiracy. There have been thousands of books written positing probably millions of slightly different conspiracy theories. I’d just like to focus on what the Majority Report hosts say specifically: that “we,” referring to the US “Deep State” has assassinated other people so it’s possible “we’ve” done it to our own head of state, implying that they ascribe to the idea that the CIA killed JFK, which, probably unsurprisingly, is the one that Oliver Stone chose to go with in his 1991 film, JFK.
I say it’s unsurprising because one of the first replies to me when I mentioned this on BlueSky was someone who wrote, “”Back and to the left” is not consistent with a single shot from the rear.”
If you haven’t seen JFK, first of all, congratulations. But despite it being extremely long and boring, a lot of people saw it, including myself. In fact, I saw it in the theater. I was ten years old in 1991 when Kevin Costner starred in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, and I was in LOVE WITH HIM. So despite my parents’ protestations, I ran to watch JFK. I did not care that it was three hours long. I did not care that it was a political thriller. I did not care that it was made by a wackadoodle conspiracy theorist. I just wanted to look at Kevin Costner.
And so for me, and it seemed all of America, “back and to the left” was a meme before there were memes. Costner said it repeatedly, the president’s head went back and to the left which is completely inconsistent with the direction the bullet supposedly came from, the book depository where Oswald was stationed. It was such a strong meme that it later ended up parodied in Seinfeld, and the superior 90s sitcom, The Critic. That’s right, come at me Seinfeld fans.
But anyway, the “back and to the left” meme simply is not true, at all. Not only did ballistics experts testify to the Warren Commission that JFK’s head motion was consistent with a bullet shot from the depository, but in the decades since then, many other studies by physicists have conclusively proven it. But it doesn’t matter, because Oliver Stone jammed “back and to the left” into our soft brain tissue, along with the idea that the CIA killed JFK specifically because he wanted to pull out of Vietnam and end the Cold War.
Personally, if I were the CIA and I wanted to kill the President of the United States, I’d probably just drop some ricin in his spaghetti, but what do I know about the best way to kill someone you have relatively easy access to all the time?
That’s just one example of many outright lies and misrepresentations in JFK. But it’s important to note that Oliver Stone didn’t just make all this stuff up himself–he really believed it because the conspiracy that the CIA killed JFK was already a popular one by the time he got around to making his movie. And here’s the fun reveal: that conspiracy theory was likely based on a work of satire published in 1967 and a randomly homophobic court case soon thereafter.
The Report from Iron Mountain was written by Leonard Lewin and originally conceived by Victor Navasky, who was an editor for an American satirical magazine called The Monocle. Navalsky happened to read a news piece about how a decrease in military spending led to a dip in stocks, which Wall Street referred to as a “peace scare.” So the conceit for Iron Mountain was that it’s a leaked classified government document detailing a multiyear study that found that if the United States ended its actions in Vietnam and stopped the Cold War, it would destroy the US economy. As a result, the fictional report suggested that the US stay in a perpetual state of war.
The satirists had a good time pretending that the report was real in order to fool the readers of outlets like US News & World Report and the Washington Post, but things started to get out of hand when conspiracy theorists started using it to support their idea about JFK and other “deep state” actions, so Lewin and Navasky ‘fessed up and publicly said they made it all up.
But true conspiracy theorists aren’t swayed by, you know, the actual author of a piece admitting they wrote it, because this is the CIA we’re talking about and of course they threatened to disappear the satirists if they didn’t give a false confession. By the ‘90s, the Report was out of print but heavily circulated amongst far-right militia groups, and even republished by a far-right antisemitic and white supremacist book publisher as an actual leaked government document.
At around the same time that The Report from Iron Mountain was published, a district attorney in New Orleans decided that a local businessman named Clay Shaw was, in fact, a co-conspirator of Lee Harvey Oswald, claiming that he went by the name “Clay Bernard” in the local gay scene. That name appeared in the Warren Commission report as someone who may have called a lawyer to ask him to represent Oswald the day after the assassination. Shaw said he never used such a name, the lawyer said he made up that story, and there was no evidence to suggest Shaw had anything to do with anything related to any Kennedy, ever, so the jury acquitted him in under an hour. But! Shaw was one of 150,000 Americans at the time who volunteered to share information from his travels abroad with the Domestic Contact Service, a subsidiary of the CIA that recruited businessmen and journalists to give them reports “on a nonclandestine basis“, and that “such acts of cooperation should not be confused with an actual Agency relationship.” But, that’s a CIA connection, which was highlighted by the KGB in dispatches to communist newspapers around the world, and so Shaw was played by Tommy Lee Jones in the movie. Of course.
I hope you can see why it’s just not worth the effort to even try to correct every bit of misinformation out there about why Lee Harvey Oswald absolutely acted alone without any conspiracy to back him up. Feel free to leave your “what abouts” in the comments because I will not be replying. Just like with 9/11, the assassination of JFK was a massive event that did tie in to the secretive and nefarious things our government gets up to, and so there will always be questions without satisfying answers.
In fact, even though I’m not super interested in this era, I have enjoyed seeing historians combing through the recent release of 77,000 pages of documents relating to the JFK assassination, because I love seeing nerds get what they want. For instance, here’s a great interview with Pulitizer Prize-winning author Frederic Logevall, in which he confirms that, yeah, there’s nothing in there to change a historian’s mind that Oswald acted alone, but there is some interesting info about the shit that the CIA was getting up to in Latin America in the ‘60s. He says that even Cold War historians like himself are shocked to discover that “40 or 50%” of some key embassies there were attached to the CIA, and a stunning 14 Cuban diplomats were CIA.
And that’s worth taking in fully: Emma and Matt seem to think that the only people who think Oswald acted alone do so because they’re naive about our government’s nefarious actions. Nothing can be further from the truth: the people who are most sure about what happened are the historians who have the knowledge base and training to dig past conspiracy theories, to check primary sources, and to distrust official reports. They’re way more sure about all this than me, because for the most part I am relying on them, the experts, to do their jobs, in the same way I rely upon scientists to carefully do their jobs and develop vaccines that are safe and effective.
And that brings me to the worst part of someone telling a large audience that they’re just wrong to believe the CIA didn’t kill JFK, because look at what else the CIA does. Big Pharma fights against universal healthcare. They prevent people on Medicare from getting affordable prescriptions. They reformulate drugs to keep them from being sold as cheaper generics. They sell “alternative” medicine that does nothing. They sell cold medicine with no real helpful drugs in them. But vaccines are safe and effective.
We love conspiracy theories in part because they make the world simpler: this evil organization can’t possibly be associated with anything good. This good person couldn’t possibly die for no reason. All of our problems are caused by one thing and if we just get rid of it, we will be happy. And unfortunately that’s just not true. No, not even for capitalism, even if the problem is pretty much always capitalism.
