Oliver Stone’s JFK is one of the greatest movies ever made about conspiracy theories because it is a conspiracy theory.
President Trump’s decision to release the final batch of JFK files this week was the right call — and, as Eli Lake notes, it likely wouldn’t have happened without a Hollywood blockbuster that’s as gripping as it is unmoored from reality: Oliver Stone’s JFK (1991).
Stone’s film — one of the great cinematic achievements of the 1990s — has a grasp of history about as loose as David Ferrie’s wig in a hurricane. It doesn’t merely twist New Orleans DA Jim Garrison’s botched investigation; it hog-ties the truth and dumps it on Bourbon Street to get pancaked by a sousaphone section and a guy in a gator suit.
Try floating Stone’s theory at a dinner party, and your friends might form a Conga line to slap you à la Airplane!. Who killed Kennedy? Stone’s answer: Who didn’t? The CIA, LBJ, the Mafia, the Secret Service, the CIA, right-wing wackjobs, crazy Cubans (my peeps), angry Texans, oil tycoons, “Tricky Dick” Nixon, and — why not? — even the Caddyshack gopher was spotted behind the picket fence, cheeky little rascal.
Mechanically, Stone’s three-hour Gish gallop mirrors how social media influencers lobotomize their audiences: it drowns you with a barrage of noise and nonsense that you can’t possibly untangle, so you surrender — and paranoia sets in. It’s one of the greatest movies ever made about conspiracy theories because it is a conspiracy theory — and whereas 1973’s Executive Action picks one lane, Stone’s film never lets you come up for air.
By the time you realize that there’s no way Julia Ann Mercer could have seen Jack Ruby near Dealey Plaza, you’re already sitting across from Donald Sutherland’s “X” spinning a monologue for the ages. Next, you’re knee-deep in the debunked “magic bullet” theory — which rests entirely on the fallacy that Kennedy and Texas Governor Connally were seated at the same height (they weren’t) — right before Kevin Costner, channeling Jimmy Stewart, pleads, “It’s up to you.”
The film hit the American psyche like a cultural atom bomb — eight Oscar nods, a flood of books and documentaries, a Seinfeld riff, and a Gallup poll showing that only 10 percent of Americans believed that a lone gunman killed Kennedy. It even jolted Congress to pass the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act in 1992, a domino that toppled all the way to this week’s document dump.
Sure, Stone may have perfected American paranoia on 35mm, but he didn’t invent it. On the night of the assassination, 52 percent of Americans already believed that there was a conspiracy. In the fog of Watergate, that number had soared to 81 percent, and it has barely dipped below 60 percent since — with a twist: Republicans are now more likely than Democrats to believe that others were involved.
Why? Partly because some “conspiracy theories” have turned out to be true. And the JFK case — like any murder probe — is a labyrinth of loose threads, contradictions, and oddities all the more disorienting when taken out of context.
But there’s something deeper, too: a quirk in our wiring. We recoil at cosmic injustice — whether it’s a loner with a mail-order rifle toppling Camelot, a traffic tunnel snuffing the life out of Princess Diana, or a third-rate Bond villain taking down 007. Our brains crave symmetry, villains worthy of the hero.
As any great filmmaker, Stone understands how to tap into our deepest psychological instincts. He doesn’t get a moral pass for his distortions, but his rage is, at least, understandable — a Vietnam veteran shattered by betrayal and disillusionment. But what’s @QPatriot1776’s excuse? Today’s keyboard sleuths aren’t scarred soldiers; they’re grifters monetizing our fears, hell-bent on turning every corner of the internet into a digital grassy knoll.
JFK was a warning, but, instead of heeding it, we turned it into a business model. Minutes after Tuesday’s JFK files dropped, Twitter lit up like one of Jack Ruby’s neon signs outside his strip joint: we saw Ramparts clippings sold as fresh intel, antisemitic bile disguised as “just asking questions,” and even a forged JFK memo about UFOs. I don’t excuse government lies, but they tend to fall into two grim buckets: self-preservation or the illusion of order. Sociopathic “influencers” peddle poison because they despise the very people they’re fleecing.
One of the core insights of conservatism is that things can always get worse — and often do. We’ve long passed the point where healthy skepticism calcified into dogma and doubt hardened into doctrine. The virtues once seen as the conservative response to hysteria — prudence, humility, restraint — are now dismissed as cowardice.
But it doesn’t have to stay that way. As Yuval Levin reminds us, the antidote isn’t just tearing things down — it’s rebuilding. “We need to inhabit these institutions, love them, and reform them to help make them more lovely to others as well,” he writes. It starts by resisting the drift toward nihilism and recovering the habits of trust, duty, and humility — brick by brick, institution by institution.
For now, we’re stuck on one of those rickety Dealey Plaza tours helmed by a sweaty huckster masquerading as a historian, swearing he’s cracked “the real truth!” We may not stop the conspiracy carousel overnight — but we can restore the guardrails that once kept it from swallowing us whole. Step one is to ditch the clown car before it barrels off a cliff.