Conspiracy theory quote is falsely attributed to JFK – The Associated Press

CLAIM: President John F. Kennedy said seven days before he was assassinated: “There’s a plot in this country to enslave every man, woman and child. Before I leave this high and noble office, I intend to expose this plot.”

AP’S ASSESSMENT: False. There is no record of Kennedy saying this quote, multiple experts confirmed to The Associated Press.

THE FACTS: Posts falsely attributing the quote to Kennedy have been circulating online for years, and the AP recently reported that the claim was even promoted by a speaker at Michael Flynn’s ReAwaken America Tour.

In recent days, the baseless quote reemerged in an Instagram post this week that has been viewed more than 24,000 times.

The post quotes Kennedy as saying, “There’s a plot in this country to enslave every man, woman and child. Before I leave this high and noble office, I intend to expose this plot.”

Beneath the quote, text reads, “JFK 7 days later,” followed by a video of a skull exploding, evoking his assassination.

However, there is no evidence that Kennedy ever said this, archivists and historians told the AP.

“We’ve been asked about this quote (and a few variations of it) many times and we’ve never found any evidence that John F. Kennedy said or wrote it,” Stacey Chandler, a reference archivist at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library, wrote in an email to the AP.

Marc Selverstone, an associate professor at the University of Virginia and chair of the Presidential Recordings Program, has also seen this quote circulate many times and told the AP that he has never seen it in a reputable source.

Chandler explained that the quote is often claimed to have come from a speech Kennedy supposedly gave at Columbia University in November 1963, either on Nov. 15 or Nov. 12. However, there is no indication Kennedy ever spoke at Columbia University on these dates or any other time in 1963, she said.

Kennedy did give two speeches in New York City days before his death, but the quote doesn’t appear in either. One speech took place at the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations convention on Nov. 15, 1963, and the other speech was at the National Convention of the Catholic Youth organization on the same day.

Staff at the presidential library have also searched for the quote across archival documents, historical newspaper coverage and speech databases like The American Presidency Project at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

“We haven’t found a match for this statement through any of these resources or via cited secondary sources,” said Chandler.

John Woolley, the co-director of The American Presidency Project, told the AP that he couldn’t find evidence of the Kennedy quote in the collection, either. “In his public remarks there is nothing at all resembling this statement in the period from November 12-14,” Woolley said in an email to the AP.

Kennedy’s assassination on Nov. 22, 1963, has long been a subject of conspiracy theories. Last year, the National Archives made public nearly 1,500 documents related to the government’s investigation of the assassination, the AP reported.

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This is part of AP’s effort to address widely shared misinformation, including work with outside companies and organizations to add factual context to misleading content that is circulating online. Learn more about fact-checking at AP.