The deaths of Jeffrey Epstein and Charlie Kirk and Donald Trump assassination attempts have sparked furious debate in many parts of the U.S. and led internet sleuths to analyze videos and dig up information to corroborate their theories that the incidents were staged or covered up.
The mainstream media and liberal-progressive media, by contrast, have largely stuck to the official line of a suicide and deranged lone wolf gunmen, and either ignored the revelations of the internet sleuths or accused them of being “conspiracy theorists.”
This latter dismissive attitude fits a long historical lineage that goes back to at least the 19th century when popular writers branded Abraham Lincoln’s assassin, John Wilkes Booth, as insane when evidence indicates that Booth acted as part of a wide political conspiracy that involved more than 70 government officials and businessmen and the exchange of at least $85,000—an enormous sum for 1865.
During an executive session of the Warren commission on December 16, 1963, before it began its “investigation” into the JFK assassination, former CIA Director Allen Dulles distributed paperback copies of a book by Robert J. Donovan titled The Assassins, which argued that while assassinations in Europe, Nazi Germany, Stalinist Russia and prewar Japan were “weapons in the struggle for political power,” assassinations in the U.S. were carried out by social outcasts and “involved neither organized attempts to shift political power from one group to another, nor to perpetuate a particular man or party in office, nor to alter the policy of the government, nor to resolve ideological conflict.”
Dulles was clearly seeking a usable history to help frame the predetermined conclusion of the Warren Commission that Lee Harvey Oswald was JFK’s lone assassin. Voluminous evidence indicates that Oswald was actually a CIA asset set up as a patsy, and that Kennedy was shot from the Grassy Knoll and not the Texas School Book Depository. Strong evidence also indicates that Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson was the mastermind of the plot, acting at the behest of Texas oil barons who feared that Kennedy would eliminate the oil depletion allowance (a major tax subsidy to oil producers) and who could profit massively from Johnson’s escalation of the Vietnam War.
Donovan’s presentation satisfied the CIA’s need to conceal the truth about the JFK and other political assassinations, and reinforced the central pillar of U.S. ideology: American exceptionalism, which argues that “the values, political system, and historical development of the U.S. are unique in human history, often with the implication that it is both destined and entitled to play a distinct and positive role on the world stage.”
Donovan wrote that “the American people may always take some consolation in the fact that the [JFK assassination] was a result of a warped mind. With all its faults and weaknesses, the Republic has endured generations of political storm and controversy with sufficient stability, restraint and morality to eschew assassination as a political device.”
These latter comments summarize why the ruling establishment is still unwilling to release key declassified documents pertaining to the JFK assassination and why books continue to be published—and given prominence in prestige media—advancing the myth of Oswald as the lone assassin.
And yet equally, books continue to be written that puncture many holes in that myth, and in the narratives of many other assassinations unrecognized as such, or where the actual killers remain unknown and unpunished, as well.
These latter books provide an evidentiary archive for telling an honest history of the U.S. that challenges the myth of American exceptionalism by showing that staged suicides, coups, and assassinations have been a core feature of American political life going back to at least the Civil War.
One of the most clear-cut examples of a conspiratorial assassination was the elite plot directed against Louisiana Senator Huey P. Long, who was killed on September 8, 1935, by two of his bodyguards who had previously worked for the Al Capone gang and the FBI.
Long was the most popular governor in Louisiana history, and he angered the state’s oligarchic elite through his efforts to redistribute wealth. At the time of his murder, he was planning to challenge Franklin D. Roosevelt from the left in the upcoming Democratic Party presidential primary.
Most history textbooks assert that Long was killed by a doctor, Carl Weiss, who had a personal vendetta against him. However, Weiss was shot and killed by Long’s bodyguards with the same caliber bullets (.38) that killed Long, indicating that the same person who shot Weiss shot Long. The gun found next to Weiss after he was killed had .32 caliber bullets and appears to have been planted next to him to try and frame him for the crime.
More and more evidence has come to light that would indicate that the so-called “deep state” was not only behind the assassination of Long and JFK, but also Dr. Frank Olson, a CIA scientist who threatened to blow the whistle on the CIA’s germ warfare program in the early 1950s, and Danny Casolaro, a journalist who uncovered the CIA’s involvement in the theft of computer software in the 1980s that was used for money laundering and other criminal activity.
The official story for Olson was that he jumped out of a Manhattan hotel window, though a professional investigation found that he was beaten to death over the head and thrown out of the window. The official story for Casolaro was that he was depressed and slashed his wrists in the bathtub of a West Virginia hotel room—a claim repeated in a 2025 Emmy award-winning Netflix documentary, American Conspiracy: The Octopus Murders, which defames whistleblowers in the case. Independent investigators found that the cuts in Casolaro’s wrists were too deep to have been self-inflicted; that Casolaro was not at all depressed; and that a man who resembled a known CIA agent was seen leaving his room right around the time he supposedly killed himself.
Political Assassinations in America: The Intricate Nexus of Deep State Crime (Clarity Press, 2026) details a pattern that can be discerned in many of the assassinations in recent U.S. history. First, the lone gunman is quickly identified and pathologized by authorities. Then key evidence is suppressed. When discrepancies are finally acknowledged in the official story due to its diligent pursuit by journalists and truth-seekers, they are attributed to deficiencies in law enforcement rather than any coordinated cover-up. When the public demands answers, authorities will often retreat behind the screen of national security.
In some cases, the victim is said to have committed suicide or died in a plane crash caused by pilot error or bad weather. When official commissions are set up, invariably they are compromised. The branding of those who question the official narrative as paranoid conspiracy theorists is key to the cover-up. So is a flooding of the internet with preposterous explanations (DC pizza shop and Democratic Party child abuse rings, for example), which are then echoed by the insufficiently informed, making handy bludgeons to discredit even the scintilla of a possibility of any legitimate or credible alternative to official narrative explanations.
Writing about the violent suppression of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), an anarcho-syndicalist union that promoted worker-controlled industry and direct-action protest in the early 20th Century, historian Joseph R. Conlin noted that “American capitalism is indeed flexible. The system has been capable of adjustments necessary for the survival of even its most obsolete aspects. But, when criticism threatens to tell, it can react monstrously against its critics.” Those critics have included victims whose murders at the hands of state agents were made to look like the handiwork of deranged lone assassins presented that way over generations in history books that distort the truth.