Jose A. Del Real writes:

The old textbook depository at 411 Elm St. isn’t especially eye-catching, but for nearly 60 years its awful past has loomed over downtown Dallas and, perhaps, all of American public life. “On November 22, 1963,” notes a modest historical marker fixed to its red-brick facade, “the building gained national notoriety when Lee Harvey Oswald allegedly shot and killed president John F. Kennedy from a sixth floor window as the presidential motorcade passed the site.”

Every few minutes, visitors pause to read the engraving — by the Texas Historical Commission, a government agency — and then point to an emphatic etch around “allegedly” that someone has scratched into the plate, in case the point was too subtle.

“They did that because they know it’s not true,” a man tells a companion one November afternoon, and then it happens again, and again, but no one is interested in sharing these private thoughts with a reporter, at least not on the record. Nobody wants to risk being called “a conspiracy theorist,” a “truther,” and they especially do not want to have their names lumped together with those other people, the ones with the Trump-Kennedy signs down the street.

Yet nearly six decades after JFK’s assassination, a significant majority of Americans believe that what really happened here was covered up or at least very seriously distorted by … someone.

Among the conspirators listed in limitless unsubstantiated theories are the mafia, international communists, segregationists, the Central Intelligence Agency, various other factions within the federal government or some combination thereof. No answers have come from decades of questions posed by a not-so-niche JFK conspiracy theory industry. But along the way, the questions themselves congealed into kinds of answers for about 60 percent of the public, who doubt “the official narrative.”

I have spent this year thinking and writing about the draw to conspiracy theories, the perverse comfort they provide and the damage they can cause. Today in the United States, we are living in an era of segregated belief, of divergent realities, at a time when social media has brought us nearer to one another than ever before. It is not just that there is disagreement. Certified and recertified elections are in dispute. Viruses and their lifesaving vaccines are in dispute. So often, facts themselves are in dispute. My focus has been on telling intimate stories about people navigating these conflicts within their families and communities. [Continue reading…]