Thread by @WillMcAvoyACN

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So, since we're talking about #ConspiracyTheories today, I would like to take a minute to talk to you about Howard Donahue and the Kennedy Assassination. Before we start, I want to be clear that nothing below is a full-throated endorsement of Donahue's views. 1/17

Donahue was ballistics expert. After the Kennedy assassination he was called in to recreate the three shots Oswald would have needed to make if he were the lone shooter. Of the 11 experts called in Donahue was the only one who got three shots off in the necessary time. 2/17

Donahue was not interested in the investigation before the demonstration, but it led him to research the Warren Report and the findings on his own. He found that the final report had almost no testimony from ballistics experts, and began his own investigation. 3/17

His own investigation concluded that the final, fatal shot to Kennedy came not from Oswald, but from a Secret Service Agent in the car following Kennedy. 4/17

Donahue's belief was that the Agent had spotted Oswald and was preparing to return fire when the second shot hit Kennedy and the vehicles began accelerating. This caused the Agent to lose his balance and in the sequence Kennedy was shot in the head. 5/17

(It should be noted here that Donahue believes that Kennedy was likely already critically wounded by the second shot, which went through Kennedy's neck, and that he also discovered a key piece of information that makes the 'magic bullet' theory far more plausible) 5a/17

Unlike other theories about the assassination, Donahue's assessment seems to come from evidence to conclusion, rather than the other way around. It also provides a more compelling reason for why the Secret Service would participate in a cover-up. 6/17

So when Donahue's work was published in the early 1990s, it should come as no surprise that it was met with a thud. Unlike other theories for the assassination, it didn't implicate the CIA, the Mafia, the FBI, Cuba, Russia, the Mexican government or LBJ. 7/17

Media coverage of the book was limited, and while I'm sure you've heard many, many conspiracy theories on the Kennedy assassination, I highly doubt you've ever heard Donahue's name. Because his theory for what happened was, for lack of a better word, mundane. 8/17

It didn't involve world powers secretly meeting behind closed doors to plan evil actions. It didn't involve massive government secrets being held by competing agencies in order to keep the truth out of the hands of the public. It was a case of a guy fucking up. 9/17

My point here is not that Donahue is right--rather, it is to talk about how we are more willing to believe that there is some massive, hyper-competent force controlling everything around us then we are to believe that the they covered up one of their own agent's fuckups. 10/17

I'm not sure what that says about us. It's worth nothing that no group rejected Donahue harder than the JFK conspiracy community, who dismissed his claims out of hand, even though there was far more evidence to support his claims than any other conspiracy theory out there. 11/17

Donahue was a ballistics and firearm expert who was hired by the Warren Commission, and who ultimately came to question some of the Commission's findings on the subject. It should have been a big victory of the JFK conspiracy theory crowd. Instead they rejected him. 12/17

And that's because there's nothing comforting, nothing alleviating about Donahue's theory. The evidence and logic behind it are not positives but rather negatives to those who trade in such things, because conspiracy theories are based on emotion and faith, no reason. 13/17

It's easy and perhaps even somewhat soothing to believe that there are people who are so good at evil that they get away with it in broad daylight. And yet the reality is that often times people just fuck up in disastrous ways. 14/17

But if it is an act of evil carried out by a shadowy cabal of those seeking to do all kinds of misdeeds, well then we don't have to worry about correcting deep-seeded structural issues within our own institutions, we can just rant about whatever group we want to blame. 15/17

How many times in your own life have you assumed that someone harmed you intentionally when it is in fact far more likely that they just fucked up? 16/17

Anyway, this is all going to get very dumb very quickly, and we have a President for whom dumb chaotic nonsense is a virtue, so get ready for a lot more bullshit to be discussed. 17/17