HISTORIANS HEAL THYSELVES: There is perhaps nothing crazier in the modern historical profession than the refusal of people who really should know better to acknowledge that Lee Harvey Oswald, a Communist, murdered JFK for political reasons. (He was also unhinged, but the two aren’t mutually exclusive.)

Let’s review. Oswald was a Communist. He had previously defected to the USSR, but was allowed to return after growing disillusioned. He then became a partisan of the Cuban Revolution, and visited the Cuban embassy in Mexico, trying to defect to Cuba. He was very angry about hostile U.S. policy toward Cuba, and before he killed JFK tried to kill well-known anti-Communist Edwin Walker.

Yet somehow, every November, instead of reminding us of these facts, “mainstream” historians gaslight us with stuff like the tweet below, implying, and sometimes explicitly stating, that JFK was the victim of “right wing hate.” They then complain in other contexts about how conservatives purportedly won’t accept “reality.”

I have a theory about why liberal historians do this re JFK. The left spent the 1950s and early 60s decrying McCarthyism as a “witch hunt,” i.e., not just that McCarthy was a lying demagogue (which he was), but that there was no domestic Communist threat, whatsoever. Acknowledging that a domestic Communist, albeit a lone nut apparently acting on his own volition, assassinated a beloved Democratic president ruins the witch-hunt narrative. That narrative has been a huge propaganda advantage for decades, and they don’t want to let it go.