The allegations of election fraud that have divided the country in the weeks since Nov. 3, and the dismissal of them by the establishment as “conspiracy theories,” remind me of another November day 57 years ago.
The assassination of President John F. Kennedy on Nov. 22, 1963, was officially assigned to the hand of Lee Harvey Oswald, a former U.S. Marine who had defected to the Soviet Union several years earlier and then returned to the United States with his Russian bride and their newborn daughter. Of course, Oswald was never convicted of the assassination because he was himself murdered by a shadowy mob-associated bar owner less than 72 hours later. Anyone who didn’t believe “Oswald did it” was labeled as a conspiracy theorist, or worse. But for many Americans, the official lone-gunman story accepted by the Warren Commission was itself the conspiracy.
There was an alternative explanation believed by millions of Americans, yet given little credence in official Washington and the establishment media: that Kennedy was murdered by elements of the intelligence community as revenge for his failure to play ball with the Deep State on various national security issues. I need not go into detail here about how such a conspiracy could have operated, and yet to this day anyone who speculates on its scope is marginalized.
A similar dynamic is operating today regarding those who have argued that Democrats stole the presidential election from President Trump. Prominent attorneys like Sidney Powell, Lin Wood and Rudy Giuliani have been painted as right-wing kooks, and the press repeatedly labels their allegations of cheating “baseless,” despite hundreds of affidavits from eyewitnesses, inexplicable vote counting anomalies, and blatantly unconstitutional changes in the voting process itself. Baseless? As Inigo Montoya says in “The Princess Bride,” “You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”
