I want to thank the Gazette so much for running Carl Doerner’s column on how to spot sloppy conspiratorial thinking in an otherwise solid daily newspaper,(“Recalling another traumatic November,” Nov. 22).
Mr. Doerner begins with the classic outrageous and completely unsourced and unscourceable claim that “it was fully known” at the moment of JFK’s death that there had been a conspiracy involving multiple assassins at the highest level to assassinate the president. Really? A few hours after he was shot, the entire nation had decided it was a government/corporate conspiracy?
As it came to be understood by researching historians, is either another masterful stroke at concealment, or just an acknowledgment that as there is such a vast library of conspiracy literature on JFK anyone can quote dozens of other “published authors and historians” who have been re-frying the same conspiracies for decades. But all this re-frying simply has helped to make a hash of the American mind. Does anyone doubt that the “mountain of evidence” of the “stolen 2020 election” will be cited for decades to come? But what does it prove other than that confirmation bias is the strongest bias of all in the human mind?
I would like to read the book this column was an excerpt from, but I could not find any reference to it Googling nor on Amazon. It reads like a synopsis for the Oliver Stone film on JFK — the mother of all conspiracy movies. And that seems the state of the American mind: we have mostly replaced knowledge, and critical thinking, with pop culture and conspiracy games.
Joe Gannon
Easthampton