The JFK anniversary’s coming up again, which means conspiracy season is too. So here’s your reminder: everything they say is out of context, distorted, or just plain made up.
Let’s start with the so-called “secret society” speech. Many still believe President Kennedy was murdered by a massive, ruthless, top-secret cabal he was about to expose. You’ve probably seen the memes: grainy photos of JFK with quotes about “secret societies” and “hidden powers.”
Those memes trace back to a real speech Kennedy gave to the American Newspaper Publishers Association in April 1961, a talk about the press, the Cold War, and the shared responsibility of protecting national security. Conspiracy theorists isolate one dramatic passage:
“The very word ‘secrecy’ is repugnant in a free and open society; and we are as a people inherently and historically opposed to secret societies, to secret oaths and to secret proceedings. We decided long ago that the dangers of excessive and unwarranted concealment of pertinent facts far outweighed the dangers which are cited to justify it.”
They stop there because the rest of the speech makes it clear what he was really talking about. Kennedy wasn’t warning about bankers, the CIA, or a “Deep State.” He was warning about Soviet communism—a very real, organized system of totalitarian control spreading across the globe.
He was addressing how the United States and its press should respond to that challenge. Later in the same speech, he said:
“I do ask every publisher, every editor, and every newsman in the nation to reexamine his own standards, and to recognize the nature of our country’s peril… In time of war, the government and the press have customarily joined in an effort based largely on self-discipline, to prevent unauthorized disclosures to the enemy.”
The “enemy” was not hidden or mysterious. It was the Soviet Union, an empire built on secrecy, propaganda, and suppression. Kennedy’s point was that a free society must resist becoming like its enemy while still protecting itself from infiltration and subversion.
He understood what today’s conspiracy culture doesn’t: that democracy lives in tension between openness and security. Absolute secrecy breeds tyranny; absolute transparency invites destruction. Both demand judgment, responsibility, and restraint.
But modern conspiracy theorists ignore that context. They twist Kennedy’s Cold War warning into some vague prophecy about “global elites.” They prefer the myth of a lone hero standing up to the shadows, struck down before he could reveal “the truth.”
In reality, Kennedy was confronting an actual global conspiracy—Soviet communism—one that declared its intentions openly and sought to win hearts, minds, and nations.
He wasn’t silenced for exposing secret powers. He was speaking about the public, visible dangers of an ideology that wanted to replace freedom with total control.
Here is a video I made on the subject:
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