While I was in high school, I became fascinated with the assassination of President Kennedy.\u00a0\u00a0I found books about the \u201cgrassy knoll\u201d, the difficulty of firing Oswald\u2019s bolt-action rifle quickly and accurately, and all of the failures of the Secret Service leading up to the shootings.\u00a0\u00a0I read parts of the Warren Commission report, itself controversial.\u00a0\u00a0And I marveled at the \u201cmagic bullet\u201d, found whole and pristine on the stretcher beside the President\u2019s body.\u00a0\u00a0And ultimately I saw the Zapruder film, with the motions of the tragically targeted President so discordant with the described attack.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
How could one crazed man change the world? How could Lee Harvey Oswald so dramatically divert our history? And later, in 1968, James Earl Ray and Sirhan B. Sirhan would each do the same, pushing our nation away from \u201cgood\u201d and into disorder. Shouldn\u2019t it take more than just one man to deflect the world? There must be some conspiracy, some greater force behind these crimes, isn\u2019t there?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I became a conspiracy theorist. I looked for phantoms behind the grassy knoll. It didn\u2019t help that a couple of years after I graduated, the US House of Representatives established a committee to re-investigate the shooting. They heard a fourth shot on an open police radio mike, \u201cproving\u201d that Oswald couldn\u2019t have been a lone gunman. I went down the rabbit hole: was it the Mafia, Lyndon Johnson himself, the FBI, the CIA, the Defense industry, the Cubans? I looked forward to 2014 when \u201call\u201d the information would be released \u2013 and then we would finally know.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Well \u201call\u201d the information wasn\u2019t released a few years ago, and we still don\u2019t know. But I\u2019ve found that once you enter the contorted world of conspiracies it\u2019s easy to slip farther into the trap. \u201cFacts\u201d become fiction, theories evolve into \u201cfacts\u201d. But, in the end, all of great \u201cconstruct\u201d of explanations are based in sand. A single wave, and it\u2019s all washed away.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
There are other great historic conspiracies. Did Franklin Roosevelt \u201callow\u201d Pearl Harbor to be attacked? What about Unidentified Flying Objects? They all sound compelling, with just enough circumstantial evidence to make them seem real.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But after 9-11, a more insidious conspiracy theory crept into American life.\u00a0\u00a0I think we were shocked that our nation was so vulnerable to terrorists with box cutters willing to die.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0So we searched from some other alternative.\u00a0\u00a0How could such great buildings, the twin towers, fall so quickly?\u00a0\u00a0How could a single plane do such damage to the Pentagon?\u00a0\u00a0Why didn\u2019t our air defenses protect us from our own passenger airliners?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The answers were in the clear.\u00a0\u00a0The buildings fell, because their design did not include a fully fueled plane striking them in the middle.\u00a0\u00a0The nation\u2019s air defense did not include a passenger airliner scenario, in spite of the Tom Clancy novel outlining that exact attack strategy on the Capitol Building.\u00a0\u00a0We got caught, wide open and vulnerable.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
After 9-11, there was a growing list of conspiracy theorists, all claiming some darker insidious force behind the attacks beyond Bin Laden. And unlike my Kennedy obsession, you didn\u2019t have to go to the library to find alternative explanations. There was a new force, the Internet. It brought compelling theories into your home. Grainy video was enlarged, slowed, and perhaps altered, to demonstrate why \u201cthe theory\u201d was really fact. And you could watch them at your leisure, over and over again.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The 9-11 conspiracies became a business. Advertising was linked to the presentations, and even more elaborate constructs were available by \u201cjust one more click\u201d. While most Americans continue to believe that Osama Bin Laden and Al Qaeda attacked us, a growing segment grew to doubt what they saw with their own eyes on that sunny morning in September. They believed that their government was lying to them, was corrupted by the \u201cunseen\u201d forces for financial gain.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cInformation\u201d is now omnipresent. We can access it at any given moment. We stand in line and view it on our phones, see it on Netflix, hear it on podcasts. Our main method of learning about the world has unlimited bandwidth, and is filled with what Kelly Ann Conway would call \u201calternative facts\u201d. It\u2019s fed to us twenty-four seven. And all of those \u201csources\u201d are so sure, so \u201cfactual\u201d, that it\u2019s difficult to find the \u201creal truth\u201d. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
There is a natural desire to find an overarching \u201ctheory of everything\u201d to describe the disparate things that happen in the world. Conspiracies \u201canswer them all\u201d, and simplify the complex nature of current events.\u00a0\u00a0The Q-anon Conspiracy Theory has all of those answers, knitting child molestation with money and political power.\u00a0\u00a0How convenient that Jeffrey Epstein \u201cplugs right in\u201d, and managed to die before his actions could be investigated.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n
We don\u2019t like coincidences (Gibbs\u2019 rule 39: there is no such thing as a coincidence). We want clear and clean answers, from the Creation Story to 9-11. But with the omnipresence of Internet information, and the growing skepticism about \u201caccepted fact\u201d; minds have been \u201csoftened\u201d. They have been prepared to accept all sorts of fundamentally unfounded ideas that fit a \u201ctheory of everything\u201d. Our minds have become fertile fields for the growth of those ideas.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
That growth creates a cynicism in many. If there are dark unseen forces controlling events, then a single vote cannot matter. If Donald Trump is leading a crusade against wealthy child molesters, whatever actions he takes must be justified. After all, he\u2019s protecting children. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Perhaps there\u2019s an even greater conspiracy here.\u00a0\u00a0Maybe Q-anon is a product of Russian intelligence, or the Trump campaign? \u00a0Perhaps Les Wexner created it with Epstein. Maybe there’s another island.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I\u2019ll create a new website, or maybe even a Joe Rogan podcast, for that one.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"