JOE ROGAN AND TRUMPIAN CONSPIRACY THEORY
That’s
a trick question, of course. Conspiracy theories never end. They just go on and
on. They can’t be killed off by a cleansing counterblast of reason and fact,
because they’re not grounded in reason or fact in the first place. They’re
ahistorical fantasies that can withstand any amount of falsification.
Take
the case of the Kennedy assassination. A few months ago, I wrote about the
Trump administration’s release of the final batch of still-classified
government files about the case. As I noted at the time, the unsealing of those
files ended up being a fizzer, objectively speaking. It revealed nothing
substantial about the assassination that we didn’t already know. The last great
hope of the Kennedy conspiracists – the hope that the hidden truth about the
assassination would be found in some long-buried government file – was
extinguished. Donald Trump didn’t set out, of course, to deal a death blow to Kennedy
conspiracy theory. But that’s what he wound up doing.
For
a while I’ve been considering writing a sequel to that piece. I’ve been waiting
to see when (or if) the other shoe would drop. I’ve been waiting to see if Trump,
or anyone in his administration, would admit that the declassification exercise
didn’t deliver the explosive revelations that certain haggard conspiracists had
expected from it. I’ve been waiting to see if anyone in the press would remind Trump
of the big windy promises he made before it began.
Those
promises were pretty grand. “When I return to the White House I will declassify
and unseal all JFK assassination related documents,” Trump
announced on the campaign trail in 2023. “It’s been 60 years,
time for the American people to know the TRUTH!” ...
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