A 13-year-long investigation by a gay writer, who reexamined the Shepard case with the intention of writing a screenplay, instead suggests that it might be more likely that Shepard was cruelly tortured and beaten into a coma by methamphetamine-crazed psychotics, who may on prior occasions have shared their drug use with Shepard and intended to rob him. For all their crude macho talk, the two evil perpetrators may have been bisexual themselves. Shepard’s own homosexuality, in other words, seems to have been incidental to, not the cause of, his lamentable death. If Shepard’s sad fate must be an icon of anything, it more likely serves as a warning that the vicious meth cartels in rural America are out of control, and the addicted can ensnare and murder anyone, including naïve college students. Again, no matter — what was false has served noble purposes in a way that what was true will not.

Many of the progressive tales that Americans grew up with in the 20th century have also been proven either noble lies or half-truths. The American Left has canonized the narrative that anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti were framed, subjected to a show trial, and then executed as a result of widespread American prejudice, xenophobia, and reactionary fear-mongering. Their executions sparked worldwide protests, novels, and plays reacting to the intolerance of a morally suspect America. Yet decades later, most historians, while they concede that the trials of 1921 did not match jurisprudence of a near-century later — nevertheless also quietly accept that the two were indeed anarchist terrorists, and at least one was probably guilty of armed robbery and murder, and the other of being an accessory after the fact. Bigots do not always arrive at bigoted verdicts.

Liberal culture likewise assumed that Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were executed on false charges of spying for the Soviet Union and that at least one of them had not really passed on secrets about the American hydrogen-bomb project. The two accused became causes célèbres as thousands worldwide rallied to save them from dangerous American know-nothings. Their messy electrocutions were supposedly likewise symptomatic of a paranoid America lashing out at easy victims in an era of Red-baiting, anti-Semitism, and rank McCarthyism.