Oswald Was A Communist. He Acted Alone

Chasing fame, just like the others

He was not different from Luigi Mangione. They are the same kind of killer

It is that anniversary again. Sixty-two years have passed since Lee Harvey Oswald, an ideological communist, killed President John F. Kennedy in Dallas. Two days later, Oswald was shot and killed by Jack Ruby, whose motive remains obscure. This was a happy convenience to the KGB, which seeded fantastical stories in the West about CIA plots, and to the American left, where those stories helped rationalize the assassin as a patsy.

Decades later, JFK conspiracy theories are as baseless as they ever were, but also as popular as ever, and nonpartisan in their popularity. They are a handy gnostic fable for revisionists of every stripe as our political center crumbles. Free agents like Marjorie Taylor Green change political houses freely, and take their Jewish space lasers with them. Roger Stone peddles his own gnostic fables about the JFK assassination plot because tearing down the system is as popular on the right as the left, now. Also, Lyndon Baines Johnson is dead, so he cannot sue Roger Stone for libel.

In my lifetime, I have seen countless attempts to place second and third shooters at the scene, most notably the absurd shadow-shapes in The Men Who Killed Kennedy. There has always been a political purpose to these hoaxes, primarily from the left. Oliver Stone’s 1991 film, JFK, a fantastical work of solipsistic drivel based on the ravings of lunatic prosecutor Jim Garrison, is of a piece with his 2009 prop-doc South of the Border celebrating leftist dictatorships. It all began with his rejection of the Vietnam War in Platoon. Naturally, if the United States was wrong, communism must have been right, he seems to have decided.

I had an inkling of this about him very early. If memory serves, around 1988 or 1989, Oliver Stone appeared in a episode of Later with Bob Costas, which I recollect being a new program at the time. Stone based his conclusion that the JFK assassination had been a conspiracy on the ‘fact’ that the bullet hole was bigger than the bullet. When I heard him, I laughed, and became a skeptic of his story. Despite not being raised in a household with guns, I had spent enough time shooting with friends to know that bullets make all sorts of holes in things. Oliver Stone is quite simply a communist who wants to excuse Oswald from guilt because he is himself a communist.

Roger Stone, on the other hand, is no communist. He is instead the sort of ‘right wing’ political operator who pays Al Sharpton to run for president in hopes of dividing the left. (Yes, that is a thing Roger Stone really did.) If you are in need of a conspiracy, Roger Stone has been a walking, talking conspiracy since 1974. As John Farrell observed in 2019, Watergate made Roger Stone into what he is, while Donald Trump completed Stone’s evolution into his present form. If you made up a conspiracy theory about a conspiracy theorist, you would invent Roger Stone.

For the skeptic, there is Norman Mailer. His 1995 true crime classic Oswald’s Tale: An American Mystery is the definitive biography of the assassin and a curative pill for your conspiracy headaches. Lee Harvey Oswald was exactly the sort of frustrated young man who shoots a president to make the change he wants to see in the world — a Luigi Mangione. We have empirical evidence now that this phenomenon exists, for it is happening again in our time.

From the moment that a bullet nicked Trump’s ear in Butler, Pennsylvania, there have been conspiracy theories about Thomas Matthew Crooks. Some people simply cannot believe he acted alone. In many minds, the ‘deep state’ is still killing Kennedy, except now Kennedy is Trump, who has a Kennedy in his government.

This week, FBI Director Kash Patel tried to quash rumors swirling around the Bureau’s investigation. “The home was completely swept. Every device in the home was collected and accessed fully. Reports say that we didn’t get into certain devices? That’s false. We got into all of the devices.” More than 500,000 electronic files have been accessed. Hundreds of agents have conducted a worldwide follow-up on every possible lead, Patel says.

William Tepes, a Norwegian ‘resistance’ YouTuber, simply responded to Crooks on the platform and had no other communications with him. No one knew what Thomas Crooks was secretly planning to do, Dan Bongino says. “We would have cracked the biggest investigation in human history — a foreign-directed plot,” Bongino said. “Why would we withhold that? But we can only follow the facts, and they are just not there.” As if the believers could be convinced with facts!

Lee Harvey Oswald was an ardent communist. He had visited the Soviets and Cubans in Mexico City, and in the Cuban case he clearly overshared his plans, so both regimes were eager to deflect any responsibility for his actions and project it on their enemies. Contrary to fuzzy boomer memories, Kennedy was not on the verge of withdrawal from Vietnam, and there is no evidence whatsoever that the course of the war would have been different if he had lived longer.

The only real conspiracy is the silence around Oswald’s animating views. It is too dangerous to admit that a young man (Oswald was 24) might be maladjusted by an ideology that is not ‘right wing’, that has the sympathy of good liberals. Contrarily, when a young man without any coherent ideology, like Crooks, tries to kill a president, everyone is too quick to project their own demons on the shooter. Luigi Mangione is popular today because he killed a health care CEO rather than a Democratic president. Crooks would almost certainly have still died if his bullet had killed Trump, and then he might be just as popular as Mangione right now.

All three of these assassins have the same ultimate motive, however: they are young, stupid men trying to be consequential. The conspiracy of one is unsatisfying to us, but all too common at the same time.