If it’s Thursday, old conspiracy theories gain new steam.
President Trump tweeting another conspiracy theory.
Baseless allegation that former President Obama wiretapped him during a 2016 campaign.
Once in the margins of politics, today, conspiracy theories are headline news.
Clinton has Parkinson’s Disease, Clinton has ties to the Muslim Brotherhood.
If the Russians are attacking our election in order to elect Trump, they’re not going to do that for free.
A conspiracy theory can spread faster than it ever could before,
because it goes like a flash on social media.
With 9/11, the whole thing is a black hole of lies.
Some conspiracy theories have become part of our national psyche.
More and more Americans, according to the polls, have become convinced they haven’t
been told the whole truth about the Kennedy assassination.
There’s nothing quite like the Kennedy assassination, I think, in the realm of conspiracy theory.
What can this seminal moment in American history tell us about the grip
of the new breed of conspiracy theories we’re seeing today?
From Dallas, Texas, the flash apparently official: President Kennedy died at 1 p.m. Central Standard Time,
2:00 Eastern Standard Time, some 38 minutes ago.
The conspiracy theories - they actually began exploding almost from the moment
it was officially announced that the president was dead.
All kinds of rumors were spreading that the Soviets might have done it, the Cubans might have done it.
It was the anti-Castro Cubans. It was the FBI, it was the Mafia.
Bobby Kennedy will ask the head of the CIA, “Did you kill my brother?”
In other words, a coup d’etat as opposed to a lone gunman.
Almost every aspect of the assassination was under dispute.
From where the gunshots came from, to the number of shooters involved.
I definitely saw the man shooting from the knoll.
It was on the 6th floor.
My book shows quite conclusively that shots came from at least two directions.
The JFK conspiracy theories arose out of a spectacular crime
that occurred under very suspicious circumstances.
Jefferson Morley has been studying the Kennedy assassination for 30 years.
He says the questions mounted when the main suspect, Lee Harvey Oswald, was killed in custody.
And the concerns escalated when the government released the findings of its official investigation.
Today, the Warren Report attempts to unravel the dark twists into which the national tragedy was thrown.
So the Warren Commission investigated
and then they put out this report, not a particularly convincing account of the crime.
They’ve sealed away some of the evidence and I think that’s rather disturbing to most people.
Why did Oswald do this?
The Warren Commission never came up with a motive. Why would he do it?
People said, "No, the government’s explanation doesn’t make sense,"
and they began to look for other ways to explain it and so they came up with conspiracy theories.
For many, the proof of conspiracy was confirmed
when they saw an amateur home movie taken by a Dallas businessman.
The most dramatic and most important single piece of evidence of the assassination was
provided by Mr. Abraham Zapruder on one roll of 8 mm color film,
Mr. Zapruder had the astonishing luck to capture the entire assassination.
When people saw the film – and anyone who sees the film I think can agree,
that when you first see it, it looks like the president
must have been shot in the front of the head because his head is thrown violently backwards.
The Warren Commission said the president was hit in the rear of the head. That basic conflict
led people to assume that there was a second shooter, evidence of a conspiracy that has
been covered up by the government. And that really is the main gist of an argument that
has now been going on for more than 50 years.
The film was studied frame-by-frame,
used as a critical piece of evidence for those challenging the official line
that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone.
As the conspiracy theories began to take hold,
the CIA issued a memo expressing concern, saying, “innuendo of such seriousness affects
[…] the whole reputation of the American government.”
A memo lays out the strategy for the CIA to marginalize and discredit critics of the Warren Commission
and he explains how you should do it.
Secretly, you should cultivate your contacts in the newspapers,
you should make “X”, “Y”, and “Z” arguments about why conspiracy is ridiculous.
But the public wasn’t buying it, and by the mid 1970’s, the lasting narrative had been set.
The CBS News nationwide poll last month indicated that in President Kennedy’s case,
68% believe that Oswald was involved with others in the crime.
I remind you that the official version is, Oswald alone was solely responsible. Only 15% believe that.
As the years have gone by, I’ve come to understand that people ache for an explanation
of the unexplainable. They ache for an explanation that’s broader, more - darker if you will
than what the facts dictate the story actually is.
And throughout history, conspiracy thinking has been part of the American fabric.
You can go back a couple hundred years and then you will see, “Oh, we’re afraid of the Red Coats."
And in the 1990s they’re afraid of the black helicopters. There’s always someone coming for us.
You know I love great conspiracy theories, and these are better than a lot of them.
Because they say "Why is the flag rippling? There is no air."
We have been conditioned to believe conspiracy theories.
Hollywood movies, television shows, but also the federal government. The federal government
kept millions of documents secret. Whether it’s looking at Vietnam, looking at the last
Iraqi war, Watergate, and you say to yourself, "The federal government is not telling us everything."
Our government, every year, declares 16 million things top secret, 16 million.
I would say that’s about everything.
But at the same time, exploding sources of information have left the public confused
about the line between fact and fiction.
At the time of the Kennedy assassination, there were a few places in the country which overwhelmingly,
people in the country trusted as honest brokers of information.
There’s no authority anymore. Nobody’s going to take CBS or the New York Times word for it.
You don’t have a common reality, and so people can generate their own facts.
This is a breeding ground for conspiracy theories.
Pizzagate is real, the question is how real is it. What is it? Something’s going on.
Something’s being covered up. It needs to be investigated.
Toward the end of 2016, conspiracy theorists honed in on leaked Clinton campaign emails
that referred to a Washington, DC pizza joint.
I got a call from a reporter with the Washington City Paper, asking if I had heard about
this kind of bubbling conspiracy theory that was on chat rooms.
The online chatter focused on words in the emails, like pizza and cheese,
and claimed they were actually code for a child sex ring run by top-ranking Democrats,
and headquartered at James Alefantis’s restaurant.
There was like hundreds of lines of chat about a human trafficking scheme involving Hillary Clinton
that focused around Comet Pizza.
You’ve got to see their menus. Notice the symbol of the ping pong paddles
and it’s clever resemblance to the FBI document’s symbol for child love.
It’s a bubbling noise. But then once this bubbling noise becomes broadcast on a megaphone
to millions and millions of viewers, it really becomes a dangerous situation.
An alarming and bizarre incident in the nation’s capital after a man opened fire at a popular pizzeria.
Court documents say Welch read online that the Comet restaurant was harboring child sex slaves.
It was completely surreal, I mean, I’m so thankful that no one was hurt.
The story of Comet Pizza can only be described as an outlandish theory.
There are no facts. There is absolutely no evidence.
There’s no photographic evidence. There’s no written evidence. There’s no evidence.
And yet it won’t go away.
I do not stand behind James Alefantis and Comet Ping Pong.
Months after the theory was debunked by authorities, protests drew people from all over the country
who believe the government is involved in the trafficking of children.
To think we could stumble upon a ring like that in Washington, DC, is very plausible.
Not even an apology by Alex Jones, the so-called “king of conspiracy,” has changed the minds of true believers.
It’s very difficult to dissuade people from their cherished beliefs.
And they’ll just pick out the pieces of evidence that seem to support it,
but then forget everything else that would not support it.
One reason conspiracy theories catch on, according to historians, is that something larger is at play.
Americans do not trust their leaders. I think that Americans do not trust the basic institutions
that govern us, whether they’re corporations, universities, the judiciary.
And that trust has been eroding for decades. In 1964, when the Warren Report was released,
77% of Americans said they trusted the government to do what’s right.
Today, that number has plummeted to under 12%.
If you don’t believe that these authorities have your best interest at heart, if you can’t
believe that these authorities are telling you the truth, you’re still searching for answers.
And what you then turn to is these counter-authorities,
these conspiracy theorists who say, “I’ve got the answers.”
And with politics becoming increasingly polarized, peddling in conspiracy has become the new normal.
We’ve moved fairly quickly, fairly deeply into a post truth, post-fact era.
That is, an era where any number of people,
including some of them in the highest reaches of our own government can say “Well, facts are fungible.”
The challenge for the truth is, you know, even greater than it ever has been.
A lot of people have come out and said I am correct.
Yeah, but the data has to show that three million illegals voted.
Forget that, forget all of that.
This president who has become an opinion-maker supreme to at least 40% of the American people
is shaping a vision that I think is going to take us decades to remove and if his style
continues as such, we are going to have a great deal of difficulty rooting conspiracy
thinking out of the American mainstream.