Iwas in second grade when an assassin’s bullet tore apart the brain of the President of the United States. It was a different time. All but a tiny minority of us readily accepted the official story. It occurred to almost nobody to imagine that upstanding citizens like Gerald Ford, Allen Dulles, and Chief Justice Earl Warren would sign their names to a report that they knew to be, or suspected might be, a lie. When, in the years and decades that followed, independent investigators came out with books offering alternate theories about the assassination, some of us read them — I read a couple, with intense interest — and allowed ourselves to be diverted by what seemed like outrageously far-fetched scenarios involving one or more of the following possible culprits: LBJ, the CIA, the FBI, the Mob, Moscow, Havana, and the Texas oil barons. But when we finished reading the books, we set them aside and returned to what we thought was the real world, in which American government institutions and the mainstream American media were nothing less than trustworthy.

Not until the candidacy, the presidency, and the post-presidency of Donald Trump were millions of us awakened to the fact that there was indeed a Deep State, a swamp, a morally nefarious political and media and military-industrial establishment, whose membership was not confined to a single party and whose determination to hold on to its own power was so all-consuming that it was capable of doing absolutely anything to destroy anyone whom it recognized as a threat to that power. Trump was that threat. Decades earlier, JFK, who had expressed an interest in reining in the CIA, had perhaps also been a threat. The difference, of course, is that in 1963 it was infinitely easier to hide high-level chicanery than it is in the age of the Internet.