All The President's Men and the End of Objective Reality

How conspiracy theories are destroying us

Now that Trump has made good on his promise to declassify the JFK assassination files and we did not discover in those files a book titled “If I Did It” by Lyndon Baines Johnson, we need to have a serious talk about conspiracy theories.

There can be no doubt that the Democrat Party is currently in a very sad state of existential near-extinction. Here at the beginning of Trump 2.0 polls show the Democrats sitting at 21% approval, while most respondents still consider Kamala Harris the leader of the party despite her running one of the worst Presidential campaigns of my lifetime… its only bright spot being that it was mercifully short.

Much of the blame for this situation lies with Hillary Clinton. Hillary, whose ego was so broken by her surprise loss to Donald Trump in 2016 that she concocted a conspiracy theory in which Trump was a Russian mole “installed” in the White House as part of an election “stolen” by Vladimir Putin so that America could be delivered into the clutches of the Russian oligarchy, and who then demanded that America’s press and “elite” institutions avenge her loss and personal humiliation on the basis of that entirely made up conspiracy theory.

And oh, how well it worked. Huge majorities of Democrat voters believed it then and continue to believe it now. And once you believe that the President is literally a foreign agent actively working to destroy the country, well, you are obliged to act… and when I think about the assassination attempts in Butler and West Palm Beach, the phrase “by whatever means necessary” comes to mind. But for mainstream Democrats as a party, the belief in this conspiracy has forced them into an official policy of Oppositional Defiant Disorder. Which is to say, anything that Trump says, does or supports must be resisted (sometimes violently) because, by definition, he is an agent of a foreign government bent on destroying the country.

Is Trump a brilliant political strategist? I don’t know, but I would submit that he doesn’t have to be. He has recognized the fact pattern I’ve outlined above and has been able to maneuver Democrats and their most rabid Resistance voters into a series of unpopular positions simply by taking the 80% side of a series of 80/20 issues and daring the Left to take the 20% side. And they have obliged him, because they have left themselves no other choice.

Conspiracy theories are dangerous that way, and not just to the body politic. They are corrosive, lethal even, to our own minds and to the way we see the world. Conspiracies are like viruses, and not just because they spread through person-to-person contact but because, like viruses, they make us more susceptible to other co-morbidities… conspiracies we might never have considered before we were infected by other, different conspiracy theories.

And just as one massive Conspiracy Theory from 2016 has laid waste to the Left in 2025, I worry that the same corrosive condition is beginning to infect much of the online Right.

The reason why Trump ultimately decided to release the JFK files is because JFK assassination conspiracy theories are suddenly back in vogue, this time with a new wrinkle… that it was the CIA who murdered Kennedy. And because it is the sacred duty of The New Right to hate the CIA, this new iteration of our most cherished American Conspiracy Theory has primarily infected The Right.

The political problem, as I see it, is that this infection is more virulent than the one which afflicted The Left. Because while the “Trump is a tool of Putin” conspiracy theory will die when Trump exits the stage in 2029… this is not true of JFK Conspiracies… they survive like cockroaches, no matter how much Raid is sprayed upon them. And just as a Leftist is obliged to do whatever is necessary to “stop” Trump because of the conspiracies they believe about him, The Right is putting itself in a position where they will be forced to act against their own Government if they convince themselves it has murdered a duly elected President, and would gleefully do so again.

So where has this new love of JFK Conspiracies on The Right come from? Mostly, it came from former Fox News host and current new media mogul Tucker Carlson.

Since late 2022 Tucker Carlson has been telling his audience that the CIA killed JFK. On a recent appearance on The Joe Rogan Experience, Tucker said “this is not a theory, it’s a fact.” But is it, really? Tucker’s claim is based on a conversation he had with an anonymous source who did not actually say that the CIA killed JFK.

As Tucker told the story in a 2022 Fox News broadcast, his CIA contact, whose name we still don’t know, first claimed that the CIA was “definitely involved” in the assassination. But when pressed by Tucker, this anonymous contact changed his claim to “I believe they were.”

In other words, this source does not actually know anything… he or she simply “believes” it. Based on what, Tucker did not say.

Nevertheless, having “established” as “fact” that the CIA killed Kennedy, Tucker subsequently went on to expand his unified theory of the CIA’s JFK conspiracy to other seemingly unrelated historical events… which, of course, is one of the dangers of conspiracy theories.

In a second Fox News monologue on the subject, Tucker argued that after killing JFK, the CIA deposed President Richard Nixon via the Watergate scandal because Nixon was threatening to expose the truth about the CIA’s involvement in Dallas. And that the leading man in this coup d’etat performance was Washington Post cub reporter Bob Woodward, who despite being young and inexperienced, was also a veteran of Naval Intelligence and therefore must have been in on it.

Since then, Tucker has repeated these claims over and over in a variety of settings including Joe Rogan and Megyn Kelly’s podcasts, as well as during interviews on his wildly popular podcast, as if they have been proven true. Thus, it has now become an article of faith on the Online Right that JFK was murdered by the CIA and Nixon later deposed by that same Agency, despite a conspicuous lack of real evidence of… well, of anything, really.

But there has been an awful lot of insinuation… an ocean of it.

The main strategy of the Conspiracist is to throw out a lot of complex and disparate implications combined with small kernels of truth in the hope that your brain will fill in the blanks in a way that leads you to the exact conspiracy they are peddling.

When Tucker first laid out his novel Nixon/JFK coup d’etat conspiracy theory in that infamous 2023 Fox News monologue, he speed read through an overwhelming series of suggestive “facts” about Woodward’s family connections and his background in Naval Intelligence at the Pentagon, and then claimed he couldn’t understand why the “unqualified” Woodward was “assigned” the Watergate story, hoping his audience would arrive at the same conclusion, that Woodward must’ve been put on the story for nefarious reasons by the “Deep State.”

It seems to me that Tucker has been watching too many movies. And here, he seems to have stolen a plot point from “A Few Good Men.” There’s a moment late in the film where Tom Cruise begins to see the outlines of the conspiracy he has walked into and says to his legal team… “Why does a Lieutenant Junior Grade with nine months' experience and a track record for plea bargaining get assigned to a murder case? Would it be so it never sees the inside of a courtroom?”

Like Kaffee, Bob Woodward was also a Navy Lieutenant… he also had exactly nine months on the job at the time of the Watergate break-in… and isn’t that interesting? Perhaps Aaron Sorkin and Rob Reiner were trying to tell us something!

Hey, I’m just asking questions…

In “A Few Good Men”, Colonel Jessup is eventually brought down when Lt. Kaffee walks him into a logical cul-de-sac from which he cannot escape. Kaffee asks him a simple question which he cannot answer, and the Colonel’s entire story begins to unravel.

On the subject of JFK, the CIA and Nixon, Tucker has walked himself into that same cul-de-sac. Carlson has been a journalist for 30-plus years. For the last 10, he’s been among the world’s most prominent. It seems impossible that he doesn’t know how Woodward “got” the Watergate story.

Because the answer is quite simple. He got it the old fashioned way… he earned it.

First of all it’s not true that Woodward had no experience as a journalist. He had been hired by the Post on a trial basis right after he left the Navy, but was not formally hired after his two week audition because The Metro Editor told him he just wasn’t skilled enough yet. So he went and got a job at a local paper in Montgomery County Maryland, where he honed his craft for a year before finally getting that dream job at the Post. By the time of the Watergate break-in, he’d been at the WaPo for almost a year.

If Watergate was a conspiracy to remove Nixon, with Woodward as its Iago, why didn’t Harry Rosenfeld hire Woodward immediately? Why did Woodward have to get busted down to the minor leagues, first? Wouldn’t two years as a reporter at the Post have been better cover for his assignment to the Watergate story than nine months? And why give Nixon three years to “expose” the CIA while “training” Woodward for his big moment?

These are questions that Tucker does not ask. If he had, he might have discovered a few critical facts.

For instance…

The Watergate story began to break on a Saturday. As Woodward and Bernstein tell the story in their book “All The President’s Men”, the City Desk Editor called for an unusual all-hands-on-deck Saturday meeting to begin running the story down. It’s important to remember that at the time, no one had any idea how big the Watergate story would become. This is another classic strategy of the Conspiracist, to mislead you into thinking that because we know something now, the same facts must have also been known in the past, even when the details were unknowable.

Eight Washington Post reporters shared the byline on the initial story about the break-in at DNC headquarters, not Bob Woodward alone as Tucker specifically claimed on his Fox show. By the time Woodward arrived at the office that Saturday, Veteran Post reporter Carl Bernstein, who had been in the newspaper business for more than a decade and at the paper for six years was already on the phone calling anyone at the Watergate who was willing to talk. It was Bernstein, not Woodward, who would dig up the first real details of the break-in. It’s fair to wonder why a conspiracy centered on Woodward would have been necessary in the first place, given the fact that the story was already in process by the time Woodward arrived.

The simplest explanation for Woodward’s involvement is not a conspiracy, but rather the fact that he had one big journalistic advantage over the rest of the City Desk reporters… one which made him indispensable to this particular story. He’d been covering local petty crimes and corruption, and so he knew his way around the very same courthouse where the Watergate suspects were going to be arraigned.

Back in those days, reporters actually went out into the world to chase down stories, rather than sitting behind their tele-work laptops waiting for self-serving leaks from government contacts. Woodward had spent enough time in this particular court that he knew all the regulars, and so a well-dressed out-of-place professional gentleman in the audience caught his attention. Woodward struck up a conversation with the man and discovered that he was a well-connected lawyer in private practice. This was extremely unusual for a courthouse where the defendants were mostly small-time crooks, pimps and hookers. Before long, Woodward had discovered the first real evidence that the Watergate burglars were not petty thieves at all, that most of them claimed to work for the CIA and that they were being protected by some very powerful people.

Tucker claims that the burglars’ CIA background was “unreported by the Washington Post” but that isn’t true, either. That very first WaPo article on the break-in, published on June 18, 1972 one day after the surprise all-hands meeting at the Post, opens with this lede… “Five men, one of whom said he is a former employee of the Central Intelligence Agency…”

“Central Intelligence Agency” is in the very first sentence of the story.

I would also note that in an early scene from the 1976 motion picture adaptation of Woodward and Bernstein’s book, during the arraignment of the Watergate burglars, James McCord tells the judge that he works for the CIA. Woodward’s (played by Robert Redford) reaction to that surprise revelation is to exclaim “holy shit!” A few scenes later, while doing background research on E. Howard Hunt, a former employer tells Woodward that Hunt also worked for the CIA, a fact which Woodward immediately repeats to his editor.

If you wanted to hide the fact that the Watergate burglars’ were connected to the CIA, I would submit that exposing that connection by putting it in the 1977 Academy Awards Best Picture winner is a pretty strange way to do it.

Regardless, it’s fair to wonder how Tucker Carlson could get such a critical detail wrong.

It’s important to note here that Woodward and Bernstein were not the only reporters on the case. The Post was part of an industry-wide competition to be the first publication to break the details of the Watergate story. Other papers, including the Washington Daily News, the New York Times and Time Magazine were on the story too. Throughout 1972 and 1973, The Post and these other publications traded Watergate scoops day-by-day. “Woodstein” weren’t even the most famous reporters on the case… Sy Hersh, already a household name for breaking the My Lai Massacre story wide open, was chasing down the same leads. All The President’s Men is as much a story about media competition as it is one about Government corruption. Contra Tucker’s insinuation, the story would have broken whether Woodward had been assigned to the case or not.

In the end, the CIA vs. Nixon conspiracy is a red herring. Woodward and Bernstein’s best source for the Watergate story was actually the FBI (that source would later be revealed as the Deputy Director of the FBI, Mark Felt). By the Agency’s own admission, the two reporters were getting 90% of their information directly from FBI reports. FBI officials even assumed contemporaneously that someone inside the agency must be reading those reports directly to Woodward and Bernstein over the phone, and said so publicly.

It seems self-evident to me that if Tucker had been forced to try and get this story past legendary Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee, it’s likely that he would’ve heard the same line Woodward and Bernstein heard on more than one occasion… “you haven’t got it.”

But Tucker’s job is much easier than mine… Tucker needed only seven minutes to lay out the “fact pattern” which, he says, implicates Woodward in a CIA conspiracy to depose Nixon and to cover up the Agency’s involvement in the assassination of JFK. I needed three thousand words to debunk a single claim plucked from those lurid seven minutes.

All the best conspiracies operate this way… they overwhelm you with unsubstantiated claims and force you to fight a constant rear-guard action that makes you appear as if you are terminally behind the fact pattern, and therefore wrong. Such is the seductive power of Conspiracy. Like the path to the Dark Side in “Star Wars”, it is easy and it is seductive and it requires none of the hard work of uncovering objective truth.

To believe in a massive conspiracy, especially the one that has become our American Ur-Conspiracy, that JFK was assassinated by his own government, is to prime oneself to see conspiracies everywhere. And indeed since that fateful 2022 broadcast, we have seen Tucker embrace a whole host of other bizarre theories from “dropping atomic bombs on Japan to end the meat grinder in the Pacific was prima facie evil” to “Winston Churchill was the real villain of WWII” to “I’m open to the idea that the Earth is flat.”

Why does any of this matter? It matters because it is dangerous. It matters because we are descending into a world where we can no longer agree on objective truth. A world where any subjective reality, no matter how ludicrous, is up for grabs.

It’s also destroying people.

Candace Owens was once a rising star in the Conservative movement. Now, she has become so addled by conspiracy that she’s been fired from her longtime home at The Daily Wire, has suggested that the CIA controls Hollywood, and that she is no longer sure that the Earth is round. Lately she has even embraced open anti-semitism and Holocaust denial.

To lose Tucker Carlson too, whose brilliant work as an essayist inspires my work here at The Continental Congress, would be a terrible thing for the Conservative movement.

I happen to think Lee Harvey Oswald assassinated JFK and that he acted alone, which obviously means I do not believe Watergate was a Coup to remove Nixon before he could reveal the truth of a CIA conspiracy to murder JFK. I believe the evidence against Oswald is overwhelming. But of course I don’t “know” it. I’m willing to admit that it is theoretically possible, though unlikely, that a smoking gun implicating the CIA in JFK’s murder will someday emerge. You may disagree and that’s not only perfectly fine, it’s perfectly American. I’m not here to argue that point. What I am here to do is to point out that no such evidence currently exists and that Tucker Carlson just doesn't have the goods, this despite his extraordinary access to the one man, Donald Trump, who could give us all the answers we could ever want. That neither man has yet done so, suggests that there are no more answers to give, beyond the ones we’ve had for 62 years.

Unless and until someone does have the goods, we must remain skeptical of any renewed push for JFK conspiracies. Because once we convince ourselves that our own Government is capable of an act of pure evil like the murder of its own President, or that it deposed Nixon to cover up that murder, or that our Government continues to protect JFK’s murderers for its own ends 60 years later, we will be obliged to treat that Government as our mortal enemy. Viewed in that context, continuing to go to work, pay taxes, and vote would be the act of a traitor, not a patriot.

And what follows logically from that conclusion would be much worse than a series of bad electoral losses… it would result in some very dark days for this Country… like Fort Sumter in April of 1861 dark.

None of us should be in a hurry to embrace that terrible future based on a shaky belief in a flimsy conspiracy theory.