The discussion in the past thread with Amazona about the JFK assassination brings up the real subject we need to delve into: what do we know for certain? This might seem like a small – and might even seem like an irrelevant – question but in my view, it is the crucial starting point.

First off, let’s dispense with the whole phrase “conspiracy theory”. Yes, we do know there are some clearly kooky ideas about a lot of things out there but when we tag something as a “conspiracy theory” what we’re doing is both dismissing it and warning everyone away from it. “Come on! That’s just a conspiracy theory! You don’t want to be one of those crazies. Right?”. It is very effective propaganda designed to shut off debate and inquiry. And the kicker on it is that it can be used both ways by grifters – some using the accusation to get people to stop asking but the mirror-image of it is used by the other grifters…those who want you to believe nonsense and so they package it up as “they call me a conspiracy theorist but I’ve just found the truth!”…this makes that grift bullet proof the other direction. The most notable recent example of this is Candace Owens who has gone off on anti-Semitic rants of late and she’s keeping her listeners on board (and clicking!) by saying those who disagree are trying to “silence the truth by calling me a conspiracy theorist!”. So, have a little care here – and dispense with “conspiracy theory”. What we have is people making assertions – test them against known facts and your own good sense; only reject an assertion if the facts and your sense indicate against them.

So, back to it: what do we know? That is the first and most important question. As it relates to the JFK assassination what we know is pretty limited. When you really grind it down, all we know for certain is that JFK was shot and killed. Everything else related to it has some questionable aspects. Even for someone like me who asserts that forensics indicates Oswald as the lone shooter I am forced to admit that a good defense attorney could have shot reasonable doubt into the assertion…not enough to have saved Oswald in a putative 1964 murder trial, but certainly enough for a dispassionate observer ten years later to go, “not proved beyond a reasonable doubt”.

The really important aspect here when you ask, “what do we know?” is that assertions by Experts and government agencies are now known to be questionable. There is no neutral arbiter whom we can rely on to speak the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. Might there have been in 1963? Possibly – but the seeds of what has come after – complete institutional collapse – were already planted by then. We can’t necessarily impose today’s dishonesty on the people and agencies of 1963 but we also can’t assume that the people and agencies of 1963 who went on to a whole series of now-exposed lies weren’t also lying in 1963.

It is good to keep in mind that in any analysis of the past, we’ll never have the complete picture. For some things we have more data than others, but all historical documents still only amount to what someone thought important enough to write down. For the historian, it is really good if several major players in an event wrote down independent, contemporary accounts because the compare and contrast can provide some real insights…but, still, even that is just what the players decided to write down. It is still incomplete. In fact, it never can be complete. There will be facts not recorded – perhaps not even known at the time by the principle actors. So, you’re never going to look back and get the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. All you’re going to get is part of the story and it is going to be written by people who had their own prejudices even if they didn’t have a specific agenda in what they wrote.

Our saving grace here is that, as God told us, “for every tree is known by its own fruit” (Luke 6:43-45). We can’t know exactly what happened in the past…but we can see what happened and so get some very deep insights into the actual motivations of those who made the decisions. Did a conspiracy kill Kennedy? I don’t know – and I likely can’t know. But what I do know is that after JFK’s death a muscular anti-Communism and a full-throated exploitation American power dwindled to “our long, national nightmare is over” and lets cancel Apollo’s 18-20. Oh, and “ask not” morphed somehow into the Welfare State. Like JFK represented something that our overall Ruling Class didn’t like…and it didn’t like Nixon…and didn’t like Reagan….and now really doesn’t like Trump…all four men being ardent American patriots who view America as the best thing and worthy of building up. If JFK’s assassination wasn’t a conspiracy it certainly worked out to a disaster for the United States…and the primary beneficiaries of the event were contemptible, thieving cowards who have just about ruined the USA.

Just to give you an idea of how bad it is – how low we’ve fallen – I looked up the construction of the USS Enterprise (CVN-65). It was an approximately 95,000-ton nuclear powered aircraft carrier that was laid down on February 4th, 1958 and went into commission (that is, a combat-effective warship for the United States Navy) on November 25th, 1961. A little over two years, nine months from laying the keel to sailing off into the ocean blue ready to do battle for the United States. I then looked up the USS Enterprise (CVN-80). It is an approximately 100,000-ton nuclear powered aircraft carrier laid down on April 5th, 2022. Wanna guess when its going into commission? They hope to have it ready in 2029. Seven years! And do you want to bet on us meeting the 2029 date?

On May 25th, 1961 Kennedy laid out the aspiration of going to the Moon in the 1960s. It was an aspiration. We had no idea how to do it other than some theories on paper. As we went into it we found that we not only didn’t know how to do it, we didn’t even know what we had to learn before we could start figuring out how to do it. But everyone went to work and the project was done in a little over eight years. Sheppard only made his suborbital flight twenty days before Kennedy set the goal. We set up the Artemis program in 2017 to get us back to the Moon and the first manned flight of the program is set for 2026. Who has benefited from this? Who’s fruit? What tree?

Kennedy wanted us to do great things. Nixon wanted us to do great things. Reagan wanted us to do great things. Trump is asserting we will do great things. Johnson: here’s some welfare. Carter: the age of limits. Clinton: depends on what the meaning of is is. Getting the picture? Those who want America to be great and get greater are hammered back into the ground…those who go along with decline are rewarded and praised. Did a conspiracy kill Kennedy? It is irrelevant if it did or didn’t – what’s relevant is that everyone the Establishment hates gets raked over the coals. That tells us what has happened even though we don’t know fact for fact how it happened. And, in the end, it doesn’t matter if its a cabal of wicked people or just a pack of stupid crooks…its all worked out the same and very badly for us.

So, in the end, all we really know is if something worked out well or badly. That it was good, or bad. And while we can’t know if the bad things were caused by malevolence or folly, we should treat all bad things as if they were caused by malevolence. Whether a person is bad or stupid, only whacking them about the head and shoulders will get them to stop being bad or stupid. I don’t care if, say, Mayorkas is in the pay of the Cartels or if he’s just stupid – in either case, I want him jailed for twenty years. It doesn’t matter, in the end, why he left the borders open…it only matters that he left them open and I’ve got no time or energy to figure out his motivation. Whether his successor is stupid or wicked won’t matter as long as in his successor’s office is a picture of him in jail.

And in service of this goal of just punishing the heck out of those who do wrong and/or are stupid, we have to stop going along with the Establishment’s demand that certain subjects aren’t open to question. I don’t care if the guy telling me something is wearing a literal tinfoil hat…I want to hear his statement and assess it on my own. And if he’s telling me that lizard people are causing the decline of American farming I’m only interested in knowing if American farming is declining. If it is, that’s bad – and I don’t care if the guys in charge were wicked or stupid, I want them broken.