At a time when talk of having lost the country is very much in vogue, along with deep suspicions of a powerful and secretive elite, the symposium seemed remarkably of the moment.

In between the dissections of events from 53 years ago, the proceedings repeatedly came back to the current election. Mr. Trump, the Republican nominee, who for years raised doubts about whether President Obama was born in the United States, has charged that the election is “one big fix” and has accused Mrs. Clinton of meeting secretly with global financial powers “to plot the destruction of U.S. sovereignty,” all while intelligence officials warn of covert Russian attempts to manipulate the vote.

The idea that political figures are at the whim of shadowy forces is a core principle of the conference. The notion that elections have always been rigged was echoed by at least one presenter: Sean Stone, the son of the director Oliver Stone, whose 1991 film “JFK” is effectively one of the conference’s founding documents. There was also extensive and generally favorable discussion of claims put forward by Mr. Trump that Senator Ted Cruz’s father had played a role in a conspiracy behind the Kennedy assassination.

But the Oswald conference is not easy to classify politically. If there was any “party” loyalty, it was with Oswald, considered an honorable patriot manipulated and impugned by conspirators, and with Kennedy, described by one attendee as among the country’s great conservatives and by one speaker as a “kind of better-looking Bernie Sanders.”

Kris Millegan, an amiable publisher of conspiracy books and the chief organizer of the conference — and a self-described “Bernie man” — said the politics here flouted the usual labels.