Oswald Acted Alone

Today is the 60th anniversary of the Kennedy assassination.

Oswald acted alone.  The more education you have, the more likely you are to know that. Gallup:

The latest poll, conducted Oct. 2-23, finds majorities of most key demographic groups believing that more than one person was involved in Kennedy’s assassination. Americans with postgraduate education are the exception, with more who say a lone gunman (50%) rather than multiple people (44%) killed the president. This was not the case when this question was last asked in 2013.

The views of college graduates (those without any postgraduate education) are closer to those of Americans with at least some postgraduate education compared with those without a college degree. Still, 57% of college graduates think there was a conspiracy among multiple parties, while 41% say Oswald acted alone.

Although majorities of all party groups believe Kennedy’s assassination involved a conspiracy, that view is less prevalent among Democrats (55%) than Republicans (71%) and independents (68%). Conversely, Democrats (39%) are more likely than Republicans (25%) and independents (25%) to support the idea of a lone gunman.

Paul Roderick Gregory at WSJ last year:

Less than a year after John F. Kennedy’s assassination, the Warren Commission released its findings to the public: JFK was killed by Lee Harvey Oswald, who acted alone. The new tranche of files the National Archives released last week contains nothing that calls that conclusion into question. But many Americans do anyway.

When the Warren report came out in September 1964, some 80% agreed with its finding that Oswald acted alone. Today more than 60% don’t believe Oswald acted alone. The persistent belief in a conspiracy has been fueled by the 400 books published on the Kennedys, most on the multitude of conspiracy theories revolving around Cuba, the Soviet Union, the Mafia, Texas oil interests, Lyndon B. Johnson and so on. One of the most amusing, in an effort to shift the blame from the leftist Oswald, lists my father and me as part of a White Russian conspiracy.


We did have a connection with Oswald. My father, a native Russian speaker, taught the language at a public library in Fort Worth, Texas. Oswald wanted a certificate of fluency in Russian and invited my father and me to his brother’s house. There we met Lee’s wife, Marina, for whom my father translated after the assassination. Moscow and some American leftists accused him of mistranslating her to shift the blame to Lee. Lee’s brother identified me as Lee and Marina’s only friend during their stay in Forth Worth.

I never doubted that Lee did it, or that he did it alone, when I saw his image on the TV screen as he was brought into Dallas police headquarters. As I told the Secret Service the next day, the Lee Harvey Oswald I knew would be the last person I would recruit for a conspiracy. He was genetically incapable of being either a leader or a follower.

The Warren report itself is a masterpiece in careful investigation. Its agents interviewed almost everyone who crossed paths with the Oswalds, down to fellow passengers on Lee’s bus to Mexico City and a landlord who once knocked on their door. The explanation of the sustained rejection of its findings rests with incredulity that history-changing events can happen by chance, especially through the actions of a nobody like Lee Harvey Oswald—a paranoid, delusional high-school dropout who expected his Historic Diary to make him an intellectual figure of the left.

I have a quite different picture as I remember waving goodbye to Lee and Marina as they boarded the night bus from Fort Worth to Dallas on Nov. 22, 1962, exactly one year before the assassination. Lee had all the attributes for a “low-tech” assassination: motive, resources, persistence, street smarts and the soul of a killer. He also needed a string of the coincidences that formed the brew for the conspiracy theories that seem to have won the day.

The loss of national innocence begun with JFK’s assassination has only gotten worse—the Pentagon Papers, WikiLeaks, Russiagate, evidence of a partisan bureaucracy, and questioning of formerly revered institutions such as the Supreme Court and Federal Bureau of Investigation. Can public trust be regained after such damage?

Christian Nationalism: A Survey

 Many posts have discussed the role of religion in American life.  

 From the Public Religion Research Institute:

A major new national survey conducted jointly by Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) and the Brookings Institution finds nearly two-thirds of white evangelical Protestants qualify as either Christian nationalism adherents (29%) or sympathizers (35%), and more than half of Republicans are classified as adherents (21%) or sympathizers (33%). This is a marked contrast from the 1 in 10 Americans as a whole who adhere to the tenets of Christian nationalism and the 19% who are sympathetic.

The report sheds light on the threat Christian nationalism poses to American democracy, reveals the drivers of support for this worldview, and explores how these beliefs intersect with other ideologies such as anti-Black racism, anti-immigrant views, antisemitism, anti-Muslim attitudes, and patriarchal gender roles.

“Christian nationalism is a new term for a worldview that has been with us since the founding of our country — the idea that America is destined to be a promised land for European Christians,” says Robert P. Jones, Ph.D., president and founder of PRRI. “While most Americans today embrace pluralism and reject this anti-democratic claim, majorities of white evangelical Protestants and Republicans remain animated by this vision of a white Christian America.”

To better understand the scope of the threat, PRRI and Brookings surveyed more than 6,000 Americans to create a new measurement of Christian nationalism. Respondents were categorized as Christian nationalism adherents, sympathizers, skeptics, or rejecters based on their responses to a battery of five questions about the role of Christians and Christian values in the United States.

Evangelical identity, church attendance strongly connected to Christian nationalism across racial lines

White evangelical Protestants are significantly more supportive of Christian nationalism than any other group. Nearly two-thirds of white evangelical Protestants qualify as either Christian nationalism adherents (29%) or sympathizers (35%). Notably, evangelical identity is positively correlated with holding Christian nationalist views across racial and ethnic lines. White (29%), Hispanic (25%), and Black (20%) Christians who identify as born-again or evangelical are each about five times as likely to be Christian nationalism adherents as members of the same racial or ethnic groups who identify as Christian but not evangelical (6% of white non-evangelicals, 4% of Black non-evangelicals, and 4% of Hispanic non-evangelicals).

At the other end of the spectrum, more than three-quarters of Hispanic Catholics, Jews, other non-Christian religious Americans (including Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, and any other religion), and religiously unaffiliated Americans qualify as either Christian nationalism skeptics or rejecters.

Americans who lean toward supporting Christian nationalism are not, as some have theorized, Christian in name only. Christian nationalism adherents are nearly twice as likely as Americans overall to report attending religious services at least a few times a month (54% vs. 28%).

Link between Republican party affiliation and holding Christian nationalist views

While most Republicans qualify as either Christian nationalism adherents or sympathizers, at least three-quarters of both independents (46% skeptics and 29% rejecters) and Democrats (36% skeptics and 47% rejecters) lean toward rejecting Christian nationalism. Republicans (21%) are about four times as likely as Democrats (5%) or independents (6%) to be adherents of Christian nationalism.

Support for Donald Trump is also highly correlated with support for Christian nationalism. Less than a third of Americans hold a favorable view of the former president, yet more than 7 in 10 (71%) Christian nationalism adherents view him favorably.

Christian nationalism linked to appetite for political, personal violence and authoritarianism

Adherents of Christian nationalism are nearly seven times as likely as rejecters to agree that “true patriots might have to resort to violence to save our country” (40% vs. 16%). Among supporters of such political violence, 12% said they have personally threatened to use or actually used a gun, knife, or other weapon on someone in the last few years. Among all Christian nationalism adherents, 7% say they have threatened to use or actually used a weapon on someone, compared to just 2% of Christian nationalism rejecters.

Further, Christian nationalism supporters display significantly more fondness for authoritarianism. While only about 3 in 10 Americans (28%) agree that “because things have gotten so far off track in this country, we need a leader who is willing to break some rules if that’s what it takes to set thing right,” half of Christian nationalism adherents and nearly 4 in 10 sympathizers (38%) support the idea of an authoritarian leader.

Connections between Christian nationalism and other ideologies

Anti-Black racism, anti-immigrant views, antisemitic views, anti-Muslim views, and patriarchal views of gender roles are each positively associated with Christian nationalism.

• A majority of Christian nationalism adherents (57%) disagree that white supremacy is a major problem in the United States today, and 7 out of 10 reject the idea that past discrimination contributes to present-day hurdles for Black Americans.
• Seven in 10 (71%) Christian nationalism adherents embrace so-called “replacement theory,” the idea that immigrants are “invading our country and replacing our cultural and ethnic background.”
• Nearly a quarter of Christian nationalism adherents (23%) believe the stereotype that Jewish people in America hold too many positions of power, compared to just 9% of Christian nationalism rejecters. Christian nationalism adherents are more than three times as likely as rejecters to believe Jewish people are more loyal to Israel than America (44% vs. 13% respectively).
• Two-thirds (67%) of Christian nationalism adherents say we should prevent people from some majority Muslim countries from entering the United States, compared to only 29% of all Americans.
• Nearly 7 in 10 Christian nationalism adherents (69%) agree that the husband is the head of the household in “a truly Christian family,” and his wife submits to his leadership, compared to only 33% of all Americans.

The correlations between Christian nationalism and anti-Black racism, anti-immigrant views, and anti-Muslim views are significantly stronger among Christian nationalism adherents who identify as white, compared to those who are non-white.

The survey also contained a standalone statement about white Christian nationalism: “God intended America to be a new promised land where European Christians could create a society that could be an example to the rest of the world.” By a margin of two to one, Americans overall reject this assertion (30% agree, 67% disagree). More than 8 in 10 Christian nationalism adherents (83%) agree with this statement, as do two-thirds of Christian nationalism sympathizers (67%). By contrast, only 1 in 5 Christian nationalism skeptics (19%) and 3% of rejecters agree that America was selected by God as a promised land for white Christians.

Other key findings

• While more than a third of Americans report they haven’t heard of the term “Christian nationalism,” those who are familiar with it are more than twice as likely (44% vs. 20%) to view it negatively.
• Americans under age 50 are approximately twice as likely as older Americans to be Christian nationalism skeptics or rejecters.
• There are only modest differences in support for Christian nationalism by race or gender.
• Christian nationalism adherents overwhelmingly express a preference to live in a primarily Christian nation (77%, including 59% who believe this strongly). This preference to live in a predominately Christian nation is only shared by a quarter of Americans (27%).
• A unique embedded survey experiment revealed an estimated 17% of Americans agree with the experimental statement that “the United States is a white Christian nation, and I am willing to fight to keep it that way.”
• There is a strong positive correlation between Christian nationalism and QAnon beliefs, particularly among white Americans.
• In the wake of the Jan. 6 riot, Americans’ views of police diverge along partisan lines. Republicans are 25 percentage points more likely to view their local police favorably compared to the U.S. Capitol Police (91% vs. 66%). Democrats, however, view local and Capitol police favorably in nearly equal measure (77% and 76% respectively).

Oath Breakers

 The Oath Keepers include current and former military and law enforcement personnel. They traffic in conspiracy theories and violence, including the Capitol insurrection. Will Carless, Grace Hauck, and Erin Mansfield at USA Today quote some members and disclose where the statements came from:

The statements are part of a massive trove of data hacked from the Oath Keepers website. The data, some of which the whistleblower group Distributed Denial of Secrets made available to journalists, includes a file that appears to provide names, addresses, phone numbers and email addresses of almost 40,000 members.

A search of that list revealed more than 200 people who identified themselves as active or retired law enforcement officers when signing up. USA TODAY confirmed 20 of them are still serving, from Alabama to California. Another 20 have retired since joining the Oath Keepers.

...

Founded after the election of Barack Obama in 2009 by Yale Law School graduate Stewart Rhodes, the Oath Keepers refuse to acknowledge the authority of the federal government. Members must abide by a declaration of conspiracy-laden orders they will refuse to enforce, including disarming the American people.

...

Just one Oath Keeper serving in a police or sheriff's department is too many, said Daryl Johnson, a security consultant and former senior analyst for domestic terrorism at the Department of Homeland Security.

...

More concerning is the fact that the Oath Keepers make their members swear an oath of allegiance, much like the police and military, Johnson said. That creates a dangerous conflict of interest.

“They look at the U.S. government as an enemy,” he said. “When it comes down to a crisis situation or an investigation involving other militias, where is this person’s allegiance? Most likely with the Oath Keepers and not the police department.”

QAnon and Religion

 From the Public Religion Research Institute:

Generally speaking, across all three questions, white evangelical Protestants, Hispanic Protestants, and Mormons are more likely than other groups to agree with each of these tenets of the QAnon conspiracy movement.

Hispanic Protestants (26%), white evangelical Protestants (25%), and other Protestants of color (24%) are more likely than other religious groups to agree that the government, media, and financial worlds in the U.S. are controlled by a group of Satan-worshipping pedophiles who run a global child sex trafficking operation.[1] Less than one in five Mormon (18%), Hispanic Catholic (16%), Black Protestant (15%), other Christian (14%), non-Christian religious (13%), white Catholic (11%), religiously unaffiliated (11%), white mainline Protestant (10%), and Jewish Americans (8%) agree with this statement.[2]

Approximately one in four or more Hispanic Protestants (29%), Hispanic Catholics (27%), white evangelical Protestants (26%), Black Protestants (25%), other Protestants of color (24%), and other Christians (24%) agree that there is a storm coming that will sweep away the elites in power. Fewer Mormons (22%), white Catholics (19%), white mainline Protestants (18%), and members of other non-Christian religions (17%) agree. Religiously unaffiliated (12%) and Jewish Americans (6%) are the least likely to agree with this statement.

With the exceptions of white evangelical Protestants (24%) and Mormons (24%), less than one in five members of all other religious groups agree with this idea, including white mainline Protestants (18%), other Protestants of color (17%), Hispanic Catholics (17%), white Catholics (16%), other Christians (15%), Black Protestants (12%), Hispanic Protestants (12%), religiously unaffiliated Americans (12%), and members of other non-Christian religions (11%). Jewish Americans (6%) are the least likely to agree that true American patriots may have to resort to violence. ...

Antivax and QAnon

Alex Kaplan at Media Matters:

Multiple online influencers known for spreading misinformation about the coronavirus and vaccines have been appearing on shows supporting the QAnon conspiracy theory, where they have continued to spread this misinformation.

Supporters of QAnon -- some of whom have been tied to violent incidents and participated in the January 6 insurrection at the United States Capitol -- have also played a significant role in spreading misinformation about the coronavirus pandemic since it began. In recent months, as coronavirus vaccines -- which are safe and effective -- have been released, QAnon supporters have turned their attacks on the vaccines, spreading numerous false claims about them.

In recent months, anti-vax influencers have appeared on multiple different QAnon shows, apparently noticing in QAnon supporters an audience primed to be receptive to their message. At least two are part of the so-called “Disinformation Dozen,” influencers identified in a report by the Center for Countering Digital Hate as the originators of an estimated 65% of vaccine misinformation spread on Facebook and Twitter.

Popular Culture and Extremist Recruitment

Marc Fisher at WP:

The far-right groups ... including white supremacists, self-styled militias and purveyors of anti-government conspiracy theories — have created enduring communities by soft-pedaling their political goals and focusing on entertaining potential recruits with the tools of pop culture, according to current and former members of the groups and those who study the new extremism.

They approach young people on gaming platforms, luring them into private rooms with memes that start out as edgy humor and gradually grow overtly racist. They literally sell their ideas, commodifying their slogans and actions as live streams, T-shirts and coffee mugs. They insinuate themselves into chats, offering open ears and warm friendship to people who are talking online about being lonely, depressed or chronically ill.

The pathways into the kind of extremism that led to the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol, threats against lawmakers and last year’s armed confrontations at state capitals nationwide are often initially anything but ideological.

“All these people who stormed the Capitol and later said, ‘What did I do wrong? I didn’t think it was illegal’ — they want what we all want: belonging, friendship, cultural meaning,” said Robert Futrell, a sociologist at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas who studies white-power movements. “We gloss over that too often, but in any movement, there’s a festival atmosphere. They gain a feeling of power from being surreptitiously connected through things they enjoy, like music. This is much more complex than just an ideological movement.”

Before conspiracy theories take root, before people decide to break the law because they think society is somehow rigged against them, there is first a bonding process, a creation of connection and camaraderie that encourages members to believe they will now be privy to answers that outsiders cannot know or understand.

“You have neo-Nazis, eco-fascists, conspiracy theorists, and what unites them is the culture, not the ideology — the videos, movies, posters, memes,” said Rita Katz, executive director of SITE Intelligence Group, which monitors online extremism.

Belief in Conspiracy Theory

At AEI, Daniel A. Cox reports on a new study by the Survey Center on American Life:

• Americans who are less connected to their community are not disproportionately likely to embrace conspiracy theories. Thirty-nine percent of Americans who belong to at least two community groups believe in the deep state, while only 23 percent of Americans who report having no community connections do.
• More than one-quarter (27 percent) of white evangelical Protestants say the claim that Donald Trump has been fighting a group of child sex traffickers is mostly or completely accurate. This belief is far less prevalent among white Catholics (18 percent), white mainline Protestants (15 percent), religiously unaffiliated Americans (12 percent), and Hispanic Catholics (11 percent).
• People who are politically segregated are more likely to embrace conspiracies. Nearly one-third (34 percent) of Republicans who report having a large number of friends who are Trump supporters say the QAnon conspiracy is mostly or completely accurate, compared to only 21 percent of Republicans who have some, a few, or no friends who are Trump supporters.
• Even accounting for other personal traits, such as age, gender, education, and political identity, the politics of friendship networks is strongly predictive of belief in conspiracies. Americans with a large number of Trump supporters in their friendship group had a nearly 50 percent probability of believing that unelected government officials were acting against the interests of the Trump administration, while those with few if any social connections to Trump supporters had only an 11 percent probability.

Believing Misinformation

Many posts have discussed the spread of myths and misinformation.

 Joel Rose at NPR:

A significant number of Americans believe misinformation about the origins of the coronavirus and the recent presidential election, as well as conspiracy theories like QAnon, according to a new NPR/Ipsos poll.

Forty percent of respondents said they believe the coronavirus was made in a lab in China even though there is no evidence for this. Scientists say the virus was transmitted to humans from another species.

And one-third of Americans believe that voter fraud helped Joe Biden win the 2020 election, despite the fact that courts, election officials and the Justice Department have found no evidence of widespread fraud that could have changed the outcome.

The poll results add to mounting evidence that misinformation is gaining a foothold in American society and that conspiracy theories are going mainstream, especially during the coronavirus pandemic. This has raised concerns about how to get people to believe in a "baseline reality," said Chris Jackson, a pollster with Ipsos.

 

COVID Misinformation

 At Harvard Kennedy School's Misinformation Review, Adam M. Enders and colleagues have an article titled :"The Different Forms of COVID-19 Misinformation and Their Consequences."  The essay summary:

• Efficiently addressing COVID-19 misinformation and conspiracy theories begins with an understanding of the prevalence of each of these dubious ideas, the individual predispositions that make them attractive to people, and their potential consequences.
• Using a national survey of U.S. adults fielded June 4–17, 2020 (n = 1,040), we found that conspiracy theories, especially those promoted by visible partisan figures, exhibited higher levels of support than medical misinformation about the treatment and transmissibility of COVID-19. This suggests that potentially dangerous health misinformation is more difficult to believe than abstract ideas about the nefarious intentions of governmental and political actors.
• Not everyone is equally susceptible to all forms of conspiracy theories and misinformation. Instead, people tend to believe in various classifications or “clusters” of dubious beliefs. Beliefs in partisan and non-partisan COVID-19 conspiracy beliefs and beliefs in health-related misinformation operate differently from one another. While some dubious beliefs find roots in liberal-conservative ideology... belief in health-related misinformation is more a product of distrust in scientists.
• All classifications of dubious beliefs about COVID-19 are positively correlated, to varying degrees, with an optimistic view of health risks, engagement in leisure activities, and perceptions of government overreach in response to the pandemic, suggesting that the acceptance of dubious ideas may lead to risky behaviors.
• The classifications of beliefs in COVID-19 conspiracy theories and misinformation are differentially related to intentions to vaccinate, levels of education, and attitudes about governmental enforcement of pandemic-related regulations. These findings can aid policymakers and science communicators in prioritizing their efforts at “pre-bunking” and debunking misinformation.

Why the Right Fears the Left

 Ross Douthat at NYT:

Let me try to elaborate on what this right is seeing. The initial promise of the internet era was radical decentralization, but instead over the last 20 years, America’s major cultural institutions have become consolidated, with more influence in the hands of fewer institutions. The decline of newsprint has made a few national newspapers ever more influential, the most-trafficked portions of the internet have fallen under the effective control of a small group of giant tech companies, and the patterns of meritocracy have ensured that the people staffing these institutions are drawn from the same self-reproducing professional class. (A similar trend may be playing out with vertical integration in the entertainment business, while in academia, a declining student population promises to close smaller colleges and solidify the power of the biggest, most prestigious schools.)

Over the same period, in reaction to social atomization, economic disappointment and conspicuous elite failure, the younger members of the liberal upper class have become radicalized, embracing a new progressive orthodoxy that’s hard to distill but easy to recognize and that really is deployed to threaten careers when the unconvinced step out of line.

...[The} spread of online conspiracy theories has encouraged liberals in a belief that the only way to safeguard democracy is for this consolidated establishment to become more aggressive in its attempts at cultural control — which is how you get the strange phenomenon of some journalists fretting about the perils of the First Amendment and demanding that the big social-media enterprises exert a kind of prior restraint over the American conversation.

QAnon

Kevin Roose at NYT:

QAnon first surfaced in 2017 with a series of anonymous posts on the internet forum 4chan claiming to reveal high-level government intelligence about crimes by top Democrats. It has since spawned one of the most disturbing and consequential conspiracy theory communities in modern history. Its followers have committed serious crimes, and its online vigilantes have made a sport of harassing and doxxing their perceived enemies. The F.B.I. has cited QAnon as a potential domestic terror threat, and social networks have begun trying to pull QAnon groups off their platforms. Dozens of QAnon-affiliated candidates are running for office this year.

...

Like any movement, QAnon needs to win over new members. And its most recent growth strategy involves piggybacking on the anti-human-trafficking movement.

The idea, in a nutshell, is to create a groundswell of concern by flooding social media with posts about human trafficking, joining parenting Facebook groups and glomming on to hashtag campaigns like #SaveTheChildren, which began as a legitimate fund-raising campaign for the Save the Children charity. Then followers can shift the conversation to baseless theories about who they believe is doing the trafficking: a cabal of nefarious elites that includes Tom Hanks, Oprah Winfrey and Pope Francis.

Antivaxxers have also used this tactic, called "entryism."

Ari Sen and Brandy Zadrozny at NBC:

An internal investigation by Facebook has uncovered thousands of groups and pages, with millions of members and followers, that support the QAnon conspiracy theory, according to internal company documents reviewed by NBC News.

The investigation’s preliminary results, which were provided to NBC News by a Facebook employee, shed new light on the scope of activity and content from the QAnon community on Facebook, a scale previously undisclosed by Facebook and unreported by the news media, because most of the groups are private.

The top 10 groups identified in the investigation collectively contain more than 1 million members, with totals from more top groups and pages pushing the number of members and followers past 3 million. It is not clear how much overlap there is among the groups.

The investigation will likely inform what, if any, action Facebook decides to take against its QAnon community, according to the documents and two current Facebook employees who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly on the matter. The company is considering an option similar to its handling of anti-vaccination content, which is to reject advertising and exclude QAnon groups and pages from search results and recommendations, an action that would reduce the community’s visibility.

An announcement about Facebook’s ultimate decision is also expected to target members of “militias and other violent social movements,” according to the documents and Facebook employees.

Facebook has been key to QAnon's growth, in large part due to the platform's Groups feature, which has also seen a significant uptick in use since the social network began emphasizing it in 2017.