When it comes to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, the mainstream press remains trapped within a 1964 paradigm. They continue to repeat the standard 1964 line that Kennedy was killed by a lone-nut communist, a former U.S. Marine who had no ostensible motive for killing the president. Anyone who challenges that 1964 paradigm is immediately labeled a “conspiracy theorist,” which is supposed to promptly end the discussion.
The problem is that as secret official evidence was slowly uncovered in the 1970s, 1980s, and especially in the 1990s during the term of the Assassination Records Review Board, the mainstream press has never confronted that evidence in the context of their 1964 mindset. They simply continue to repeat the old trope about “conspiracy theory.”
In 1964, it might have made sense to employ the term “conspiracy theory” against someone who was asserting that the assassination might have been carried out by the U.S. national-security establishment. While there were many anomalies and inconsistencies in the official narrative, there was still scant evidence that had surfaced pointing to the national-security establishment as the malefactor in the assassination.
It’s worth noting that the same could be said of U.S. national-security regime change operations both before and after the Kennedy assassination. When people initially posited the possibility that the U.S. national-security establishment had planned or orchestrated the removal of Mossadegh (Iran 1953), Arbenz (Guatemala 1954), Lumumba (Congo 1961), Castro (Cuba 1959 – 1963), and Allende (Chile 1970 – 1973), it might have made sense to initially label it a “conspiracy theory.” But as the secret evidence increasingly surfaced, it made sense to ultimately shift from conspiracy “theories” to actual regime-change conspiracies within the U.S. national-security establishment.
Once the 1990s came along, the same phenomenon occurred with the Kennedy assassination, especially when the ARRB forced the Pentagon and the CIA to disclose a mountain of assassination-related evidence that had been kept secret for 30 years. Owing to the revelation of that long-secret evidence, the concept of a conspiracy “theory” now no longer made sense. What now made sense was a the concept of a definite conspiracy within the national-security establishment to effect a domestic regime-change operation that was similar in principle to its several regime-change operations in foreign countries.
Yet, the mainstream media remained mired — and continues to remain mired — in the old 1964 “conspiracy theory” paradigm. They are terrified to address the mountain of evidence that inexorably points to the national-security establishment’s role in the assassination.
For example, as I detail in my two books The Kennedy Autopsy and The Kennedy Autopsy 2, a mountain of circumstantial evidence points to a fraudulent autopsy that the U.S. military conducted on the president’s body just a few hours after the assassination. It’s not possible to come up with an innocent explanation for a fraudulent autopsy. It simply cannot be done, which is a likely reason the mainstream press has simply chosen to avoid confronting and analyzing the issue.
Once the evidence established a fraudulent autopsy, there was but one conclusion that could reasonably be drawn — that it was done to cover up the commission of the crime. What other reasonable explanation could there be?
Everyone involved in the autopsy was sworn to secrecy. They were told it was a highly classified operation. That was one of the reasons the military, rather than civilian authorities, was charged with conducting the fraudulent autopsy. They knew they could keep a wall of official secrecy around the operation. In the 1970s, the secrecy wall began to be cracked. In the 1990s, a large portion of it came crashing down. Nonetheless, the mainstream press has remained mired within the same 1964 paradigm, behaving as though the state of the evidence is the same as it was in 1964.
For many years, I’ve witnessed a reluctance among many libertarians to address the regime-change operation that took place in November 1963. Go search libertarian websites for any mention of the Kennedy assassination. You will have a difficult time finding information about it, even though you might find information about the other regime-change operations that took place before and after the Kennedy assassination. Over the years, I have heard some libertarians say, “Oh, it just seems so complicated.” Others have expressed concern about being labeled “conspiracy theorists.”
But it is imperative that the American people come to terms with what happened on November 22, 1963, and why it happened. And it is the libertarian movement that is capable of leading America to confront all aspects of our nation’s national-security legacy, as dark as they might be.
FFF has come up with a conference that will be oriented toward people who are not well-versed or widely read on matters related to the Kennedy assassination but who very much want to understand the how and the why of the assassination — and who want to learn why the assassination still matters deeply today, given that the institution that ostensibly protected “national security” from a president whose foreign policy was opposite to that of the Pentagon and the CIA is still the most powerful, dangerous, and destructive force within the U.S. government.
The conference, which is entitled “The National Security State and the Kennedy Assassination,” will consist of an online weekly series of presentations on Wednesdays, beginning on Wednesday, March 3, and continue to Wednesday, April 3. Our conference website and registration page will be going live in February. Admission will be free.