>>573344Most don't think about it much, but I'd say the majority would say there was a conspiracy, and if you asked "whodunnit" a lot of them would say the CIA or something but they wouldn't really be able to articulate why. I think that's an important thing, the lack of a theory to understand the why, not necessarily the who or the what.
Also I strongly suspect the propensity for believing that Oswald was just a lone nut goes up the more affluent you are. The more you buy in / benefit in the "system" the less likely you're gonna believe that "the system" (or forces produced by it) killed JFK, because that creates a lot of cognitive dissonance about the nature of "the system" in which you're benefiting from. I think higher propensity to believe in a conspiracy is related to distrust in "the system," so it reached a high in the mid-late-1970s, declined, but then has gone up again. Might be at an all-time high.
There has also been new work on it, like Oliver Stone's new film (narrated by Whoopi Goldberg, who is someone liberals will relate to). I think blacks btw are gonna be more open to the idea "yeah, they killed that guy," because they're just more skeptical of glowies than white liberals are even if they – on the whole – are in the same "party." They have their own history of that happening to their leaders. But the interest in JFK was also a "boomer" thing for awhile, and I don't think the left paid much attention to it either, and I remember just a few years ago how it was common for leftists to say "who cares, JFK was just another imperialist," and while I think that's true it's also kinda stupid. I think that's changed, because there's more of an awareness that even if you were a nice "liberal" imperialist or a social democrat doesn't mean there wasn't a military-threaded ultra-right that is taking your number and thinking about how to take you down for not being hard enough on the commies.
Which is what I think it was really about, and why most Americans lack a theory to understand the why. It was sort of like McCarthyism by other means. Like a lot of "communists" in America were not really that red. The ones in the thick of it were, but there were plenty of "fellow travelers" who were basically liberals on the periphery of it, in media circles or in public service who thought Stalin was weird but socialism sounded like a good idea and a likely future form of society, and maybe they read Monthly Review and then BAM – they got hit by a hammer in the early 50s and they dropped all of that. Not the ones who went to prison, but the ones on the outer orbit.
People like AOC. She interned for Ted Kennedy and she's a "socialist" now because it's sorta okay now, but she might've been in the Communist Party in the 30s. There were a lot of people like that. Some ended up coming back, getting jobs in the State Department during the Kennedy administration, now as anti-communist technocratic liberals, and they fucked it up and the situation escalated and now there are Soviet missiles in Cuba and so… what were the ultra-right guys thinking? They might've thought, these guys are either incompetents, or they're crypto-commies, Kennedy is compromised, maybe HE'S ONE TOO. You see how these paranoid freaks act.
But you couldn't talk about communism in the United States. Or what these guys were willing to do to stop anything that smelled like it.
Lastly, this is why I believe that ~conspiravision~ brain is a distraction, like Q-Anon people. I went to Dealey Plaza one time, the building Oswald was in is now a museum, and then there a handful of local guys who mill around on weekends, and independently give conspiracy-themed street tours and sell conspiracy literature to people – some of it quite good actually. But I was talking to one guy, and he was an older black dude, and I said in so many words that Kennedy was killed by hardliners within the "national security" state because they didn't think he was tough enough on the communists, and this guy became visibly uncomfortable. Like the "communist" word is still taboo for that older generation, and then he said something about the Rothschild bankers and the Trilateral Commission being involved and something about how the Vietnamese weren't "really" communists. That has to be written out of the story, even the conspiracy theorists do it.
Like talking to someone in Deus Ex who is right that it was a conspiracy but also sorta gets it wrong (although in Deus Ex the Illuminati is very real).
It's interesting though. The JFK assassination has become part of the American folklore, because the circumstances of the assassination have shaped the country and the world we live in today. A lot of people get the sense that there's something deeply *wrong* about the country and that moment is part of the reason.