Sorry, everyone — Oswald still acted alone | RICH LOWRY

All we need to know about the Deep State, we supposedly learned when John F. Kennedy was assassinated in 1963.

In the aftermath of the attempted assassination of Donald Trump, Sean Davis of the conservative website The Federalist wrote on X, “They did it to Kennedy, and his brother, and they just tried to do it to Trump.” In a recent conversation with Donald Trump Jr., Tucker Carlson casually referred to the system having been broken “for at least 61 years since they killed a president in an election year.”

The JFK conspiracy theories originally emanated from the left. As the right has come to hate and distrust the Deep State, though, the theories have seeped over. That such conspiracy theories have so long endured, and, in fact, found new converts on another part of the political spectrum, is a stunning victory of paranoia over reason and fiction over fact.

For all its consequence, the JFK assassination is an uncomplicated murder case. There were only three shots that day, and they were all fired from the Texas School Book Depository, where Lee Harvey Oswald worked. Almost all the witnesses thought the shots came from the direction of the depository. Multiple witnesses saw a man with a rifle in the sixth-floor window. A couple of Oswald’s fellow employees were on the floor beneath him and saw cement loosened by the shots fall from the ceiling.

All of this is why the police had an accurate description of Oswald within minutes and why an officer immediately rushed to the depository and found Oswald right after the assassination; he let him go when Oswald’s supervisor said he was employed there. Oswald was a good shot during his stint in the Marine Corps, and the longest shot, the third, which killed Kennedy, was only from 88 yards away — considerably closer than Thomas Crooks was to Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania. Kennedy’s two entrance wounds were from behind.

No one who knew anything about Oswald could be surprised. He was a misfit with a history of violence, including trying to assassinate a right wing general. Would the CIA have recruited Oswald to do its dirty work? It’s a fantastical notion. Not only was Oswald an utterly unreliable character, he was a pro-Castro Marxist. Besides, why, if the CIA was omnicompetent enough to pull off such an operation, did it not deploy a super-sniper who could get in and out of Dallas quickly?

Instead, it allowed him to careen through the streets of Dallas, a desperate man, and after he was captured, permitted him to be interrogated by the police for days, when he could have unraveled the entire plot.

Ah, you say, but they didn’t need to rely on Oswald’s discretion because they had a hit on him planned via his shooter, the strip club owner Jack Ruby? This was clearly an impulse killing by another violent misfit, who believed he’d be hailed as a hero by taking out JFK’s assassin. Regardless, no organization that valued loyalty or discipline ever would have trusted Ruby, any more than Oswald, with anything — not the CIA, and not even the Mafia.

It made sense that the anti-American left gravitated to a conspiratorial view of the JFK assassination. But now some on the right are so disaffected from contemporary America that they, too, think that our history is a tale of the nightmarish scheming of shadowy forces.

We thought we were citizens of a decent, open society, when the truth, or so they believe, is that we live in the plot of an Oliver Stone movie.

Rich Lowry is on X @RichLowry.