On skepticism, questioning authority and conspiracy theories

Last week one of my colleagues at Saint Peter’s University invited me to give a guest lecture in a class aboutmedia literacy, discussing conspiracy theories, how to define them, how they manifest in our culture, how they are both reflected by and shared by popular entertainment, and how they are amplified and spread by social media. I'm pictured about to start the lecture. It was a great opportunity to discuss this with students since I had written a book about the topic and teach a course on it. And it was great hearing that this same professor also uses the critical examination of conspiracy theories as a tool for various exercises in several of his classes, as do I. 

Discussions like this should always start with a precise definition of what we mean by “conspiracy theory,” what the term “conspiracy” means in a strict legal sense, and how it differs from those outlandish, rococo speculations of grand cabals and shadow organizations of blood-drinking cultists and Satanists. As far as the law is concerned, a “conspiracy” is any instance of two or more people colluding to commit a crime. Gangs and organized crime cartels are conspiracies in the legal sense of the word. Films like the “Godfather” trilogy and “Goodfellas,” or TV shows like “The Sopranos” are crime films, not conspiracy theory films. Films like “The DaVinci Code” and its sequels, TV shows like “The X-Files” or the plethora of Roswell crash and UFO cover-up entertainment, however, fall into the “conspiracy” theory category.

 

Conspiracy theories, as a whole, are claims about secret organizations of such immense power and control as to be able to create a false consciousness in an entire global population, organizations of such reach and influence as to be able to start wars at will, manipulate economies, and construct fictions like mass shootings in the mainstream media every day. Conspiracy theories, in short, refer to grand plots to run everything according to some unified grand scheme…and plots that have absolutely zero tangible proof of their existence. For example, we had a little thought exercise pretending to be the New World Order plotting the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and concluded how the major conspiracy theories contradicting the U.S. government’s explanations for the events of that day are as absurd as the Moon Landing Hoax conspiracy theories or the chemtrail conspiracy theories.

 

But all this is not to say that an outright denialism of conspiracy theories is all desirable either. As so much of history has proven the old adage, absolute power does corrupt and it corrupts absolutely. The opposite side of a knee-jerk non-belief is when we turn “conspiracy theory” into a thought-stopping cliché, the shutting down of all dissent, debate, and discussion. We saw this with the knee-jerk reactions to the claims that the COVID virus might have escaped from a lab in China. Just a few years ago, if you said something to that effect on social media, you could have been deplatformed and branded a hateful, racist conspiracy theorist. I had written about that issue right here in previous blog posts.

 

So what is the solution to the problem, my colleague and I finally asked. The best that we can do in a free society is to educate in logical, critical thinking, and media literacy. To try and turn out students who will be able to cast a skeptical eye at organizations of authority and power, whether those organizations of power are governments, corporations, or collections of charlatans spreading malicious lies about fake mass shootings, Satanic cults hiding under pizza parlors, COVID being spread by chemtrails and activated by 5G towers run by the cabal that assassinated JFK from the grassy knoll and fluoridated the drinking water.

With our focus on such pedagogy, we can only hope that no Saint Peter's student will every walk away from our school listening to Alex Jones, thinking that Oliver Stone's film "JFK" was an accurate dramatization of the assassination, for fall for any the nonsensical fantasies spread on conspiracist webpages and social media.

Some guy named Oliver is upset with declassified JFK documents…

Oh, yeah! Oliver Stone! Now I remember. He used to be big in the early 90s. Unfortunately—or, rather, fortunately—he hasn’t been relevant since. Nonetheless, as he was readying the November 22 premiere of his new Showtime documentary, “JFK Revisited: Through the Looking Glass,” about, you guessed it, explosive new “facts” that prove a vast Deep State conspiracy killed John F. Kennedy, he had been giving various interviews, basically handed the microphone  by the media to revisit conspiracy theories that have been long proven to be a pack of sensationalistic, absurd fabrications. The Hollywood Reporter gave him the opportunity to write this op-ed piece about his dissatisfaction with a newly released batch of recently declassified government documents about Kennedy’s murder. For Stone, not surprisingly, the documents are still incomplete and it still gives him reason to disbelieve the official version of events.

 

In his documentary, Stone now points the finger to Allen Dulles, one of the founders of the CIA, as the chief mastermind behind the assassination. Stone apparently has decided that Lyndon Johnson, his head conspirator in his 1991 film, “JFK,” was not really the grandmaster behind the conspiracy after all. And Stone must have decided that his insanely long list of conspirators, including FBI agents, J. Edgar Hoover, the Dallas police brass, members of every intelligence agency and high-ranking commanders in each of the armed forces, “the homosexual underworld,” New Orleans businessmen, and Texas oil tycoons was not quite long enough.

 

Why Stone is given the platform to make his new documentary now and treated to a great deal of favorable media coverage is puzzling. In the wake of Covid, anti-vaccination movements, and the age of QAnon, the media’s long-running romance with conspiracy theorists has thankfully cooled off. Oliver Stone, however, has turned up again and somehow he’s being given the benefit of the doubt by outlets like the Hollywood Reporter. Maybe they think this favorable treatment is okay since Stone’s films supposedly performed an important function of inspiring much needed skepticism in people when it comes to official government sources and organizations of power and influence.

 

Except Stone’s work has done nothing of the sort. “JFK,” his magnum opus, his impassioned call for truth and justice and taking back democracy from shadowy cabals that subvert the will of the people, is a piece of fraud. The film is a manipulative con job that created enough controversy to garner the film smash-hit box-office numbers at the time of its release and made Stone a lot of money. Luckily, not only have historians dismantled the film at the time of its release, but the in the years since, numerous publishers have bucked the conspiratorial trend and put forth several books challenging the JFK conspiracy mythology. Amidst the multimillion-dollar conspiracy industry the media had created over the decades, feeding the appetites of book readers, TV-viewers, and moviegoers wanting to believe in real life capers and shocking mysteries, more rational minds have prevailed and have thankfully debunked all the conspiratorial foolishness clouding John F. Kennedy’s memory. Among several books and documentaries on the subject, the best one is Vincent Bugliosi’s “Reclaiming History,” not only answering every conspiratorial argument but exposing Stone’s film in a chapter so long and so thorough as to let it stand alone as a book by itself.

 

While the exaggerations and manipulative slight of hand in Stone’s torturously long 3-hour movie can hardly be covered here—again, I highly recommend Bugliosi’s book just for its analysis of the film—I think it’s important to make the point that “JFK” is deliberate deception and not, as film critics and his fans always claimed, simple artistic license in order to create a coherent narrative. “JFK” is a carefully constructed set of distortions and misrepresentation of facts and people. The most egregious of these distortions is the presentation of where people sat in Kennedy’s limousine as it drove through Dealey Plaza. The lynchpin of the entire Kennedy conspiracy is the argument that the bullets that struck Kennedy and Texas governor John Connally could not have come from the direction of the Dallas School Book Depository and been fired by Lee Harvey Oswald. “JFK” attempts to demonstrate this in one of its courtroom scenes where Kevin Costner’s Jim Garrison character displays a drawing of the car, its seats, and the positions of the car’s occupants, proving beyond a doubt that bullets that struck Kennedy and Connally would have had to magically shift in mid air to cause the damage they did. The scene is a dramatization of conspiracy theorists’ “magic bullet argument” that also claims to prove that the wounding and killing shots could not have come from Oswald’s position on the sixth floor of the book depository. The problem of the scene, however, as is the case with the entire conspiracy theory it’s based on, is that the position of the seats and their occupants in the film is not accurate. Stone knowingly changed the position of the limousine’s occupants to make the “magic bullet” arguments of the conspiracy theorists look plausible. This is not creative license for the sake of dramatic impact. It’s a piece of deliberate deception. The entire  movie is flim flam, an elaborate lie intended to deceive people.

 

Furthermore, what ultimately makes “JFK” inexcusable and the “it’s only a movie” argument unacceptable is the fact that Stone had always staunchly claimed that his film was NOT “only a movie.” Upon its release, Stone claimed in interview after interview that the film is perfectly accurate in every one of its claims and the depiction of the assassination. He had, in fact, urged moviegoers to use his film as a tool for activism and reject the Warren Commission’s conclusions about Oswald acting alone. 

 

One can not ethically use deception as a tool to get people to take action. As I always discuss with my students in the media ethics course I teach, when you lie to someone, you are robbing them of their autonomy. You are no longer free when you make your decisions about how to act based on someone else’s deliberate deception. When someone is lying to you, they are leading you around by a leash. They have turned you into their slave, their puppet.

 

“But even if Oliver Stone distorted the facts in a movie, could there not be a greater good in inspiring people to question the government, be skeptical of the official version of events, and think for themselves?” Stone’s defenders usually ask. 

 

The answer is “no.” The conspiracy mythology propagated by “JFK” has not led to a world of skeptical critical thinkers. It has led to a world of QAnon, Flat Earthers, anti-vaxxers, and belief systems that deny any kind of consensus reality, science and logic. As Tim Weiner writes in his excellent Rolling Stone article about Oliver Stone and his conspiracist derangement: 

 

“I can tell you for a fact that our democracy is suffocating under an avalanche of disinformation. Trump won the 2020 election! Covid vaccines are seeded with microchips! Democrats are blood-sucking pedophile communists! 9/11 was an inside job! Our body politic is being poisoned by lies. They stalk the land like brain-eating zombies. And we can’t seem to kill them.

 

“We have a moral obligation to call bullshit when we see it. Especially when public figures promote lies for profit. Stone’s JFK films are fantasies. Conspiracy theories are not facts. They’re a kind of collective psychosis. And they’re driving our country down the road to hell.”