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What do the JFK assassination files and an obscure booklet called “The Adam and Eve Story” have in common?

Both are examples of how the CIA and other Deep State actors keep us guessing and in the dark: by over-classification.

A “sanitized” copy of Chan Thomas’s immortal classic of seeming ultra-nuttery, the aforementioned “Adam and Eve Story,” was de-classified in 2013. Now on the CIA’s website, it floats a wild theory about human history and life on this planet, complete with repeated global, world-turned-on-end catastrophes.

Most people had never heard of the work until de-classified and placed on the website. The Wikipedia entry mentions the de-classification of the document but not why it was classified as secret in the first place.

Here’s a theory: to confuse us.

The only reason most people ever give the booklet a second glance is because the CIA made it secret.

Now turn to the present, with something circulating today as “evidence” from the recent release of backlogged JFK assassination documents: a summary of passages in the New Left journal Ramparts, June 1967. It reproduces a rumor about one Gary Underhill and his alleged blurting out that “a small clique within the CIA was responsible” for the shooting in Dealey Plaza.

All the rage online, but this document was merely the re-regurgitation of public information — which is what an awful lot of classified material is.

We take note of this Underhill story not because it proves anything, but because the report was made secret in the first place.

It’s almost as if they want some people to believe something, and others to scoff at it all.

But maybe what they are doing is burying us in useless “information.”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Ooga Booga Time

Two tribes —

On the left, we see both iconoclasm (razing of Confederate memorial statuary) and a fixation on surface meaning (defending the actions of antifa by fixating on its name: “it just means ‘anti-fascism’!).

On the right, rallying around the flag and MAGA hats has reached fever heat.

— Welcome to Ooga Booga Time.

In other words: tribalism.

Consider the upcoming movie about Neil Armstrong, the first man on the Moon. The makers of this movie have made a point of not depicting the raising of the Stars and Stripes above the dust of Mare Tranquillitatis.

Why? Because, says the Canadian actor who plays the part of astronaut Armstrong, the filmmakers wished to present “Armstrong’s success as a ‘human achievement’ rather than a patriotic American victory.”

But it was, factually, very much a Cold War victory.

What the filmmakers are doing is rewriting history to conform to their cosmopolitan, internationalist tribal mindset.*

Nothing new, of course — Hollywood has been a propaganda mill for a very long time. Once it aligned itself with Washington, D.C. Not any more.

Now, apparently, even depicting a central bit of traditional American symbolism in the history being filmed is so stylistically, ceremonially offensive that actors and directors and cinematographers avert . . . our eyes.

“One thing is needful,” philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche wrote. “To add style to one’s character.” Maybe. But when it comes to politics what we need — in Hollywood and Washington and Anytown, USA — is less attention to symbolism. To style.

And more on substance. And truth.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* And, perhaps, to appease the propaganda-minded censors of Chinese government. That’s Ben Shapiro’s take.

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