Nowadays (when most Americans have just read about it in history textbooks), it feels like most people believe the official narrative and dismiss conspiracy theories as "crazy".
Using gallup: https://news.gallup.com/poll/514310/decades-later-americans-...
It seems that a majority doubt the official narrative these days (that LHO acted alone), but it was much lower in the past.
There are, of course, limits to polling. People will tend to lie about things with social consequences, but you specifically call out polling data in your post.
Ah okay, didn't realize a majority of people still doubt the official narrative. Thanks for the link.
But yeah, it was previously at 11% believed official narrative and has now risen to 30% it seems.
That'll teach me to post while doing other stuff
A significant confounding factor here is the encompassing and totalizing nature of modern conspiracy theories: there's a substantial difference in breadth, depth, and assumed priors between a JFK assassination conspiracy (painted against the backdrop of 1960s social and political upheaval) and something like QAnon.
Put another way: American culture is prone to conspiratorial beliefs, but isn't (yet) prone to Big Lies.
I think it's very prone to it. In fact I think *most Western democracy's cultures are prone to such beliefs In some countries it now affects half of the population in others 'merely' 30%. But there isn't a country where this isn't a problem.
Lost Cause mythology, pretty much everything related to the popular conception of mid-century American society, "It's not a recession because hiring and consumer spending are strong," etc.
(To my original point about breadth and depth: the adoption of non-conspiratorial but otherwise fringe views is a large part of what makes contemporary conspiracy both syncretic and naturally limiting — a “big tent” policy around conspiracies makes it hard to latch onto a single Big Lie.)
https://blogs.iu.edu/establishingshot/2021/02/15/the-myth-of...
Government, industry, and academia conspired to disseminate a narrative regarding the Civil War that they knew not to be factual but that served their sociopolitical purposes. This is the textbook definition of a Big Lie, and it was the standard interpretation of events for more than one hundred years in large swathes of this country.
>I don’t know what the alleged recession conspiracy would be.
Because it was successful.
You didn't address the mid-century, so I'll expound: the Big Lie of a stable and affluent 50s, where the standard American nuclear family lived in a modest home in a nice suburb and espoused traditional values that kept the country on the straight-and-narrow (adopted most infamously in the various incarnations of "Make America Great Again", which were absolutely centralized campaigns by an identifiable set of figures) is oft taken to be the truth - never mind that this was the era of McCarthyism, war in Asia, "urban renewal", racial strife, PTSD-addled fathers and drunk housewives inflicting Baby Boomers with trauma that warps the American social landscape to this day, etc. There is a non-trivial part of America that wants to go back to an era that never existed, because they bought the Big Lie of its utopianism.
I don’t think the 1950s American Dream is a Big Lie. A Big Lie is specifically a gross and intentional, top-down fabrication that displaces truth (because the lie is inconceivable). 1950s America is none of these things: it’s a collective fantasy based on distorted and politicized memories. It’s also not taught as a normative history (although that may unfortunately change).
This is perhaps pedantic, but I think there’s value in splitting these things apart: the US is chock full of rosy lies about its past, actual conspiracies, and conspiracy theories. But the closest thing we’ve had in living memory to a Big Lie is the lie of a stolen 2020 election, which (as of yet) has not achieved the kind of astounding dominance needed to survive as a Big Lie. But we will see.
This just exposes your perspective bias. Black families would tell you that it was an obvious lie that was hidden from white America, which was increasingly made up of people with no familial memory of the antebellum period (and even fewer with direct contact to either slavery or the Civil War). To characterize (perhaps liberally): you had white people of influence and a longer-lived ancestral presence in the country, colluding to distort facts about an event that the families of 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th generation immigrants were not here to witness. It was not just a Big Lie, it was a Grand Lie, spanning decades and becoming so normalized that its influence on political sentiment remains even after the lie itself has been largely (though not completely) dispelled. You also see echoes, bolstered by the preceding lie, in the "race riots" (more correctly termed "massacres") of the early 1920s.
>1950s America is none of these things: it’s a collective fantasy based on distorted and politicized memories. It’s also not taught as a normative history (although that may unfortunately change).
I don't think this is correct. It was a view of America that was propagandized at the time. It was inconceivable (particularly to industrialists who were relying on a "return to normalcy" to shore up national morale after the nightmare of total war) that America could emerge from WWII, get the Good End, and yet still have all of these problems. So, as instructed by our elites, we pretended they didn't exist, slowly building the powderkeg that exploded in the 60s and 70s. It's a testament to its strength as a Big Lie that it still lives past its nominal reconciliation.
I'll add climate change denial (energy companies) and public health concerns about smoking (cigarette companies) to the list.
>But the closest thing we’ve had in living memory to a Big Lie is the lie of a stolen 2020 election.
Iraq, as it turns out, does not have WMDs, though I imagine that the proportion of American flag kitsch-to-population remains higher than pre-2003.
I'm a little concerned that you're so adamant that we've not experienced this seemingly common phenomenon. Perhaps we need to discuss "American Exceptionalism"?
Your point about WMDs in Iraq is a great example. I would consider that a Big Lie, and so I stand corrected.
This makes sense to me, because after all this time if we don't have anything which backs up the conspiracy theories it is sensible to believe that the results of the official investigation are largely accurate.
After their investigation, they concluded that the official narrative was most likely wrong and they found a high probability that two gunmen fired at President John F. Kennedy.
There were no investigations after that..
> Scientific acoustical evidence establishes a high probability that two gunmen fired at President John F. Kennedy. Other scientific evidence does not preclude the possibility of two gunmen firing at the President. Scientific evidence negates some specific conspiracy allegations.
> The committee believes, on the basis of the evidence available to it, that President John F. Kennedy was probably assassinated as a result of a conspiracy. The committee is unable to identify the other gunman or the extent of the conspiracy.
https://www.archives.gov/research/jfk/select-committee-repor...
> At the HSCA, Joannides had been specifically assigned to handle queries about the DRE and its relations with the CIA. The Agency had assured the committee that he had no connection whatsoever to the matters under investigation; that, in fact, he was merely an Agency lawyer and had not been “operational” in 1963. These assurances were self-evidently false. At one point, Joannides informed the committee that the identity of the DRE’s case officer at the time of the Kennedy assassination — Joannides himself — could not be determined.
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/jfk-assassination-do...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_F._Kennedy_assassination_...
A good summary of the evidence that Oswald acted alone can be found here: