Public interest in presidential autopsies has seen a resurgence thanks to the multitude of conspiracy theories surrounding the death of President Donald Trump from COVID complications in 2020. Prior to that, you might have very occasionally encountered the odd Kennedy-obsessive opining on the lesser-populated corners of the internet about bullet trajectories and second gunmen. But the QAnon/LibertyNow!/anti-vaccine movements turned thousands into wannabe-pathologists, so much so that there’s reportedly an unofficial squad of federal employees whose job it is to identify and scrape doctored reports from online forums and the like.

All to say: no one needed a crystal ball to predict that it would be a real scrum when the Ruiz presidential autopsy was released, but I don’t think anyone expected the White House and the Congressional Commission on the Events of July 4, 2023 — colloquially, the “Ruiz Commission” — to distribute the preliminary findings from the “black box” flight data recorder and the Ruiz autopsy on the same day.