Melissa Kaplan and Ami Ewald, LCC’s Information Literacy Librarian, co-host Topsy Turvy, a Galaxy Forum series about conspiracy theories, misinformation, and how to navigate it all. David Siwik joins to talk about conspiracy theories and how they take hold with particular focus on Pres. John F Kennedy’s assassination in 1963, over 60 years ago.

Email: Melissa Kaplan

Email: Ami Ewald

Email: David Siwik

Website: Google News

Website: News Literacy Project

Welcome to Galaxy Forum. I'm your host, Melissa Kaplan, and we're here to explore issues and ideas that matter to the LCC galaxy, to discover how the work of our stars connects with the community and how the community connects with us.

This episode is part of a series called Topsy Turvy, developed with co Host Ami Ewald, LCC's Information Literacy Librarian. Hey, Ami.

Hi, Melissa.

Topsy Turvy.

Because sometimes that's just how the world seems as we attempt to decipher what's true in all the information coming at us, remembering the importance of context and that we're all on a continuum of understanding. On today's episode of Galaxy Forum, Topsy Turvy. Our guest is historian David Siwik, a professor at Lansing Community College.

David is a writer and also has a podcast on LCC Connect Land Stories exploring the history of Lansing and the LCC environment. David, thank you so much for joining us.

Well, you're very welcome. Thank you for inviting me on.

It's really fun to have a colleague in the college, as well as a podcasting colleague to be a guest today. So it's great.

Absolutely.

It's gonna be fun. We're gonna talk some history today.

We are a little history, especially around sort of conspiracy theories and how they come about and with this historical sort of twist to it. So I'm gon open with that. So, David, why do you think conspiracy theories arise often around these historical events?

Well, I'm going to answer that in a somewhat contradictory manner. I think they arise out of historical events because most of the time the truth is very boring. And every now and then, life doesn't get boring.

It gets very exciting for a second. And those are the major historical events. And then life goes back to being really boring.

And I think what happens is people are unable to understand that even these dramatic events that oftentimes spawn these conspiracy theories have sort of very mundane background to them. The cause isn't as exciting as the event. And I think that that's one of the reasons why conspiracy theories develop.

People have a hard time wrapping their brain around the fact that something might have happened for no reason at all, truly is random, or something that seems very dramatic happened, but it has a very simple explanation to it that seems so simple that people think there must be further to it.

Right. There's got to be more. That's too easy, right?

Yeah.

That makes so much sense to me, and I think to bring it home, can you give an example or two of where that is the case where something Might have a relatively.

Might be a random event or have a relatively simple explanation, but over time, it's the truth, or the feeling about the truth has completely changed.

Sure. Well, there are a lot of things that have happened throughout history that we could use as examples.

One that I will give isn't really historic, but it's been in the news quite a bit lately, and so I will give it as an example here. The hurricanes that have hit the southeast of the United States the past month or so, a couple months.

If you're not familiar with that, what that conspiracy theory is, is it says that the airplanes that you see flying overhead are spraying some type of a secret potion onto you to control your mind, make you do all kinds of behavior that whoever the controlling agency behind this is would like you to engage in. When you see an airplane flying overhead, you see something that appears to be coming out of the back of it, Right?

Right.

Well, actually, what you're seeing is the cloud that the heat that the jet engines generate forms. Right. It's very simple science.

Like third or fourth grade, you would have learned that when water heats up, it vaporizes, and then when the temperature drops, those water vapors condense and they form a cloud. And so when an airplane flies through the sky, it makes little clouds from the heat of that very simple scientific process going on. Okay.

That's like the easiest explanation in the world to explain why I see white things in the sky. When I look out, an airplane's flying overhead.

Why do you think that? That's not understood. Why has that. Because I've heard of the chemtrails before.

I didn't realize they were also being connected to the recent hurricanes.

Sure.

Why do you think that's connected and that people kind of succumb to that?

I think, again, it goes back to a search for that. Answer the question why?

And when it comes to a recent, or we'll say an active conspiracy theory, the thing they're trying to figure out the why over, in this case, it's a very dramatic event. A hurricane happens, it destroys your house.

If people are predispositioned to believe in very wild and alternative explanations for something happening, then they may be more likely and More willing to read or watch a YouTube video or have their friend tell them about something that we who are not spots into the conspiracy theory would think is totally bizarre and actually think, wow, maybe that explains why my house just blew away.

And we see this historically of course too, where sometimes you will have a conspiracy theory develop out of an event that happens that has both very simple but also very complex reasoning behind it. And that oftentimes opens the door up to wild conspiracy theories. And the bigger the event, the more wild the theories could be.

Yeah, a lot has been written over the years about that one. That's a big one.

It has. I'm nodding my head for those of you that are listening to us.

It's very, is complex whether the explanation is simple or not. But can you as a historian tell us a little bit about that event and what theories have legs?

Sure, sure. And the Kennedy event, it's an example and it's an event that has many conspiracies behind it.

But I think it's an example of a lot of the stuff I just identified where you have in that case. It's really a complex situation.

You have a historical event that was one of the first to be recorded almost in its entirely in both audio and visual recordings. Right. So we have various film clips of the actual assassination itself of Kennedy.

We have film clips that show events that happened right after and right before the event.

We have a plethora of other sources, written sources and audio recordings all made at the time, all involving various aspects of things that happened that we could connect to the Kennedy assassination itself.

And, and again, the fact that all this was recorded by a media that at the time and when the Kennedy assassination happened, was itself undergoing a real revolution in its expansion. Man's ability to connect to people across the country. So ostensibly Kennedy travels to Dallas, Texas for a campaign speech.

Kennedy is an incumbent, he's not as popular as the historical record nowadays would suggest. Meaning Kennedy was not liked by 100% of the American people. Imagine that he was the President of the United States. Right.

We don't usually give full on praise to our leaders and our politicians. And Candy had approval ratings that were in the mid 50% range. Yeah. So he travels to Dallas, Texas.

It's an early campaign event for the presidential campaign which will really be in earnest the following year. And this is a time in America where there are a lot of things going on across the world that Americans would be very in tune to. Right.

This is the height of the Cold War.

Right.

Kennedy administration itself was involved very seriously in trying to overthrow the Cuban government at the time, because the Cuban government had declared itself views early as a communist government. And again, this is the height of the Cold War. So Cuba has been in the news, Communism has been in the news.

Other foreign policy developments at the time. This is right after the Berlin Wall is built in Germany. So this is the Cold War is the theme here.

A threat to American identity, therefore, is something that would have been on the minds of people at the time. And all of this is going on. Kennedy travels to Dallas, Texas. He's assassinated on national tv.

Basically because the film footage that was captured is rebroadcast fairly quickly. That I think itself. All the media coverage of the Kennedy assassination is actually what gave birth to the conspiracy theories surrounding it.

Kennedy was not the first president to be assassinated, unfortunately. America had a history of violence wreaked upon its political leadership.

and then languished with a severe wound that he died of the infection of a few months later.

So all this happens decades before Kennedy ever is president, but when he is assassinated again, because so much of this was covered in real time by the media, that I think that gives birth to some of the conspiracy theories that surrounded it, including Lee Harvey Oswald, of course.

So. Of course.

But I think it would be great if you could expand on that a little bit, because while you're a historian and you know this, I admit I don't know all the details, and I think that'll be great for me and for our listeners, too.

Very quickly, Lee Harvey Oswald is arrested as a suspect. Oswald had attempted to kill a guy just a few days before and had been arrested for that, actually.

He had attempted to shoot a guy by staking out his house and then pointing a rifle into the guy's window while he was eating dinner and taking a shot at him. Now, he had missed, but he was on the. To use a modern term, he was on the radar of authorities in Dallas.

Now, Oswald had a background that as A historian I would look at and have looked at and would think immediately, wow, this guy seems like a very likely person to have committed this crime. Oswald had been in the U.S. marines.

He had been discharged from the Marines and then traveled to the Soviet Union in the height of the Cold War and attempted to renounce his American citizenship at the US Embassy in Moscow, actually, and become a Soviet citizen. And for a period of time he lived in the ussr, including in Minsk, which is now the capital of Belarus. Belarus is its own country.

He was making a statement that he wanted to leave the United States and become a communist in Russia. Well, life didn't turn out so good for him in the Soviet Union.

He actually ended up leaving the USSR and he claimed that he was frustrated that it wasn't actually the workers paradise that he had believed it might be. And I'm speaking somewhat sarcastically here because the Soviet Union was sold, if you will, to its citizens as the Communist workers paradise.

And, well, it wasn't discussion for another day. Yes, Oswald returns to the United States and then is. Is unable to adjust to life as an ordinary person at this point.

He has married a woman that he met in Russia. They have a kid together.

And Oswald, by all of the evidence, and that's a really important word to insert in here by all the evidence was gathered by authorities after the assassination. The evidence proves that beyond a reasonable doubt.

And I will say that again, the evidence proves beyond a reasonable doubt that on the day of the assassination, Lee Harvey Oswald spent several hours in the Texas School Book Depository. He worked there. The rifle that was ballistic used ballistic science.

The police used ballistic science to trace the bullets that came out of that rifle that Lee Harvey Oswald owned and that other people had seen him with that rifle in his possession. He waited for the motorcade to come by at the point where he would be able to take a shot. And he shot several times.

He ended up hitting the President and killing him. He also hit John Connolly, who was governor of Texas at the time.

There were a couple of bystanders that were hit with shrapnel from ricochets from the bullet hitting. One person was injured when a piece of concrete, for example, ended up being jarred loose by a bullet hitting it.

The interesting thing about all the Kennedy conspiracy theories is they all revolve around who did it, Right?

Yes. And many of them are like, Oswald didn't do it, or Oswald was working for the Soviets.

Exactly. Or that Oswald was working for an American. So there's usually three and you've identified them. Melissa.

There's usually three takes that the conspiracy theories do.

On the Kennedy assassination, it was an inside job and Oswald was set up for it, or it was an outside job and Oswald was set up for it, or somebody else did it and Oswald was the fall guy. For somebody who actually pulled the trigger, it's usually centered around one of those three angles.

And the problem with all the conspiracy theories is, and my email address, if anybody wants to get a hold of me to suggest Otherwise, is siwikdcc.edu.

the problem with all the conspiracy theories surrounding the Kennedy assassination compared to the evidence that came out of the Warren Report is exactly that. It's the E word. It's evidence.

There's no evidence to suggest absolutely none, that compares to the very firm evidence we have, including ballistic evidence that shows that Lee Harvey Oswald was in possession of the weapon that killed the President. The conspiracy theories have no evidence that even comes close to that. And so in my mind as a historian, I can only operate off of evidence.

Now, what I. So in my mind as a historian, the conspiracy theories have no validity to them at all.

Now, the conspiracy theorists would come around and say, ah, don't you know, you're buying right into it. They, they in quotations, destroyed all that evidence. That's why it doesn't exist. Now we have a problem.

Right?

And that's something that I think is often the fallback for conspiracy theorists is that somehow the truth is being concealed, destroyed, and that you'll never really be able to find out. But it's very likely that it is this action that caused it.

Sure. And that type of logic, there is an illogical component to it, but we'll just use the term logic for this purpose right here.

That type of logic really sets a conspiracy theorist up to never be proven wrong. Because his fallback position is always, you can't prove me wrong because I just told you there's no evidence that exists.

Well, of course, the logical fallacy in that is, yeah, so guess what, you can't be proven right either. But as long as that is hanging out there, it's it, it, it really is a sort of a sinister take on the scientific method. Right.

The scientific method is all based on hypothesis and evidence. You observe a phenomenon, you propose a hypothesis to explain the phenomenon.

And then you gather evidence that either proves or disproves your hypothesis, which in the end is a theory of the phenomenon you're observing. Historians attempt to do the same thing. Our phenomenon we observe are past events of human behavior.

And then the evidence that we have to gather are things that would either prove that that event happened in the way that we think it did or would prove causality behind it. And that is where the conspiracy theorist is always lacking.

He doesn't have the evidence to prove causality, nor does he have the evidence to disprove the alternative theory to his conspiracy.

So to take it back to the Kennedy assassination, if I go up to a conspiracy theorist who believes the CIA did this as an inside job, I would ask him, where's your evidence for this? And he would say, well, the CIA would have destroyed any evidence for that. So that's a silly question. Okay.

But then I would come back and say, but I have very solid evidence that shows Lee Harvey Oswald owned and possessed the gun that was used to kill the president. And we have ballistic evidence that shows the bullets that came out of that gun were actually the ones that were used to kill the President.

How do you counter that evidence? And they can't. They can't.

They can't. But it still remains. Has a hold on the imagination of so many. And it carries on. I mean, this is 60 years ago. 60 years ago.

And we're recording this episode just a couple days before the anniversary actually, too.

Right.

And I do feel like sometimes we keep getting new. We'll say new evidence. Right. A new account or. I'm thinking of just last year, one of the Secret Service agents during the.

Who was there during the assassination released his own book, kind of portraying his side of the story and what he saw as those events that happened that day and leading up to it. So it's always interesting to see sort of these new evidence that comes out or new accounts or a new take on it.

And then I also think that's kind of going back to your idea about the media. Right.

And with the JFK assassination, they were saying that the media had actually released the parade route like three or four days prior to that taking place. So, you know, Oswald would have had a very clear idea of where to be for that day.

And that's another part of the. I'll say the non conspiracy theorist, the logical, the historian, the type of evidence that he's looking for. That's another example.

The media back then, to show you how much times have changed Absolutely. Broadcast the parade route and they wanted everybody to show up, the President's coming into town. Why wouldn't we?

People back then didn't necessarily think of the security concerns that we would think of nowadays.

One is exactly what you just mentioned, Ami, and that is because every now and then we get these releases of information about it, and some of it actually comes from the government.

It comes from official sources that were produced at the time of the investigation or subsequently by the FBI in some cases, who were investigating this crime.

And that's the other thing that I've used that term crime on purpose because most of the evidence that we get from the Kennedy assassination is the same type of evidence you would get in any murder, any criminal murder investigation.

And a prosecuting attorney is going to be looking for different types of evidence if she's trying to prosecute a murder, for example, than a social theorist would be looking for if she was trying to investigate what was the mood of the community at the time that the assassination occurred. But those would both be valid sources, right?

They're both legitimate pieces of evidence that presumably would have been produced by people who lived through the event. Whereas again, a conspiracy theorist, how do they reply to all the evidence against Lee Harvey Oswald?

And he very much fits what a criminologist nowadays would call the profile. The likely profile is somebody who would commit this type of a crime.

And a conspiracy theorist would not have that type of evidence to counter the legitimate scientific psychological profile evidence that people use at the time, actually. And somebody would use nowadays in investigating, again, a crime, somebody committed a premeditated murder here, which is what the assassination was.

Right.

Something that's lasted, that's captured the public's imagination for 60 years. There's, yes, misinformation, misunderstanding, a lack of context, maybe just taking certain things on the surface. But the damage is different.

When a conspiracy theory arises, that's more immediate.

For example, like chemtrails or some of the other things that were theorized about the hurricanes, the cause of the hurricanes, that a certain political party could cause the weather to move and locate, which captured a certain number of people's imagination. And there are other that the government's working against a lot of different things. So it can be really damaging.

I don't know at this point, the damage that could. Do you think there's damage that happens as a result of people believing conspiracy theories about the JFK assassination?

I think there could be.

I mean, as a historian I can see that if people at the time of an event are so bought into illogical explanations for it that they waste all their resources trying to pursue that, then in that case we've damaged the investigation of an incident like this.

That's a good point.

We would also be doing a great injustice and disservice to anybody who's a victim of a crime or some other bad behavior during a historical event happening if again, we are focusing on the wrong way of investigating the incident. And you know, I think of, well, we'll go back to the example of the chemtrails. Hurricanes aren't caused by that period. I mean, they aren't.

And immediately my knee jerk reaction might be to laugh and think, well geez, that's kind of silly that somebody would actually believe in that.

But that would be a really limiting response to that because those people actually are really going to be putting themselves in harm's way if they truly believe that.

And they would be rejecting true legitimate help that might even save their life if it's coming from the government believing that the government's actually the one that caused the problem to begin with. So yeah, there could be very serious damages done by continuing to believe in conspiracy theories and on a broader scale.

And this is, I think, part of the reason why, to go back to a point I made right at the beginning about the Cold War and the Kennedy assassination itself. But why so many conspiracy theories developed during the Cold War? And that is because people were living in an environment of fear to an extent.

And there was, people were told every day there was a legitimate threat to your entire existence.

The Cold War was a war that was basically fought by both sides having the belief instilled upon the other side citizenry that they could wipe them out with the push of a button through nuclear annihilation. And that is a very serious sort of, sort of Damocles to be hanging over society's head.

A lot of people think feel threatened. A hurricane is a very real threat to somebody's existence.

And then we can see where an outstanding or an existing conspiracy theory could be tapped into and all of a sudden explode into something that is very damaging.

Absolutely. That's such a powerful analysis, David. I wish we had more time to delve into more of these with you.

I know we will have you back as a guest, and I feel that. I feel fortunate. I feel for all of the three of us. We are in a place where we have an opportunity to educate.

And I think that's one of the big ways of resisting is to inform. And so hopefully we can all continue to do that.

So thank you so much, David Siwik, for joining us, historian with Lansing Community College and LCC Connect Podcaster, and thank you to our listeners for listening today. We will put some notes and links on our site that you can connect with David and us if you'd like.

And you can also find other episodes of this podcast and all the LCC Connect programming at LCCconnect.org Special thanks to our technical producer today, Daedalian Lowry, and to Andy Callis for composing our theme music. I'm Melissa Kaplan.

And I'm Ami Ewald.

And this is Galaxy Forum on LCC Connect.