by Jonathan Kay
Since the New Deal era, America has been ravaged by a noisy on-and-off culture war, waged, in part, between those who are at peace with the need for bigger government, and those who are not. The “mildly schizoid” quality of American political life means that this culture war is fought not only between two camps of political partisans, but often within Americans’ own dissonance-wracked minds.
This explains why the war is not only shrill, but endless: Since most American conservatives would never actually accept the much smaller government they claim as their goal, their war demands will never be met—even when their legislative armies conquer Washington.
So, instead, populist conservatives send waves of culture warriors into an unending series of symbolic proxy battles—“death panels,” liberal media bias, border fences, evolution, gay marriage, don’t ask/don’t tell—that allow them to express their “schizoid” frustration through angry rhetoric, partisan attacks, and sometimes outright conspiracism, all without much changing the size of government, or preventing it from performing the functions on which we have come to depend.
This aspect of the American intellectual landscape has pathologized political debate—turning every discussion about legitimate policy areas into a screaming match about which of the Founding Fathers are being made to spin in their graves, and by whom. Yet it is also an aspect that most Americans seem to take utterly for granted, not realizing how strange it all seems to an outsider.
Perhaps that is why the book you are reading was written by a Canadian.
Part II
Meet the Truthers
Chapter Five
Why They Believe: A Psychological Field Guide to Conspiracists
For the truth is that life on the face of it is a chaos in which one finds oneself lost. The individual suspects as much, but is terrified to encounter this frightening reality face to face, and so attempts to conceal it by drawing a curtain of fantasy over it, behind which he can make believe that everything is clear.
—Jose Ortega y Gasset
There are three infallible signs of the crank—that oddball, goofball sort of person who mutters, as he walks along, about how he’s grasped the key to everything. The first is that he has a theory about the Jews. The second is that he has a theory about money. And the third is that he has a theory about Shakespeare.
—Joseph Bottum
The first four chapters of this book focused largely on conspiracism as a historical phenomenon. Conspiracy theories, I’ve shown, are more likely to blossom when great tragedies or national traumas—the French Revolution, World War I, the assassination of JFK, 9/11, the 2008 financial crisis—rupture a society’s intellectual foundations, and shatter citizens’ faith in traditional authority figures. I have also described the three major influences on American conspiracism—apocalyptic religiosity, faith in small government, and the rapid onset of invasive technology; and described the structure of most popular conspiracy theories by reference to the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
But this big-picture approach tells us little about what motivates flesh-and-blood individuals to join conspiracist movements. Even in an intellectually traumatized society such as post-9/11 America, most people manage to resist the lure of conspiracism. This chapter will profile the characteristics of those who don’t.
Surprisingly little research has been done on the psychology of conspiracy theorists. The few, scattered academic papers there are on the subject tend to be free-form essays by intellectual dabblers in the fields of philosophy, psychology, and political science. Even the few social-sciences researchers who’ve systematically surveyed the views of conspiracy theorists generally have been unable to identify any universal causative factors: Among survey respondents, the only characteristic that strongly correlates with belief in any particular conspiracy theory is a belief in other conspiracy theories.
That’s because—as I’ve learned from my interviews—conspiracists tend to come to their beliefs for many different reasons. On a personal level, conspiracism is not so much a psychological ailment in and of itself as it is a symptom of a mind in flight from reality. That flight can be induced by any number of causes—including radical nationalism, tribalistic hatred, midlife ennui, narcissism, profound psychic trauma, spiritual longing, or even experimental drug use.
This chapter will offer readers a typology of the different varieties of conspiracist, along with sketches of a few typical specimens. In the next chapter, I will explain how and why their systems of belief often coalesce into something resembling a religious faith.
A wide range of conspiracy theories are represented in this material—from 9/11 Trutherism to ultraradical feminism to antivaccine activism. Some of the profiled theories are full-fledged conspiracist narratives in the tradition of the Protocols. Others are more limited in scope. But these details are of secondary importance: The organizing principle in this chapter is not the type of conspiracy theory being embraced, but rather the underlying psychological function that conspiracism performs for the affected individual.
The Midlife Crisis Case
Richard Gage: Truther Extraordinaire
After spending months taking in Truthers’ messianic fervor on the Internet in 2008, my first visits to their real-world conferences proved to be something of a let-down. Truth movement propaganda comes off as slick and impressive when it’s broadcast as web video, wherein arcane talking points can be packaged with glossy multimedia effects, ominous narration, and a catchy soundtrack. But once Truthers deploy to a real-world community center or academic lecture hall, the varnish of professionalism washes away, and the underlying crank conspiracism rises to the surface.
A typical 9/11 Truth event features about a half-dozen speakers. A local organizer or two will urge audience members to raise awareness in the community. Then a liberal arts professor or alternative journalist will lecture the audience about American state terrorism and neoimperialism. This might be followed by a speaker who focuses on some loosely related niche subject or other—media bias, Islamophobia, or Israel.
These speakers will attract polite applause. But they’re just warming up the crowd for the main attraction: the celebrity mega-Truther who’s been flown in to headline. These are the high priests of the 9/11 Truth movement—men (they’re almost always men) who’ve dedicated their lives to preaching the gospel at congregations across North America.
Unlike the warm-up acts, the headliner recites his speech entirely from memory. He’s given this talk dozens—perhaps hundreds—of times. The presentation is full of detailed references to airplane trajectories and chemical analyses. From experience, the headliner knows what buttons to push, what topics to emphasize and avoid, when to pause for laugh lines. When the time comes for Q&A, the headliner smoothly parries questions offered up by doubters in the audience (if any remain). As the event ends, fans cluster around him to continue the discussion. On their way out, they stop to buy a DVD copy of his lecture so they can share the Truth with friends and family.
Of all the Truther headliners I’ve seen, the very best is Richard Gage, a balding, mild-mannered, middle-aged architect who heads up a California-based group called Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth. I’ve heard Gage speak three times in three different cities. At each event, the response was rapturous. At a 2009 lecture in Montreal, his crowd sat mesmerized as he spoke for three straight hours—on a night when the Montreal Canadiens were contesting a playoff game, no less. At a speech in New York City a few months later, the audience burst into a spontaneous chant of “Ri-chard! Ri-chard!” Blushing and grinning like an earnest, overgrown schoolboy, Gage blurted out: “Your enthusiasm knocks my socks off!”
Truthers often are prone to rambling: Your average amateur might take the podium with an overflowing sheaf of Internet printouts, and cycle disjointedly through a half dozen sub-topics. Not Gage. His singular focus—laboriously examined in a six-hundred-slide PowerPoint presentation he trots out at every opportunity—is the precise sequence of event
s leading to the collapse of the World Trade Center buildings. Avoiding speculation on the Pentagon attacks and the machinations of the Bush White House is critical to the mission of Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth, he says. “We’re building and technical professionals,” Gage tells his audiences. “We’re not conspiracy theorists.”
Thanks to his bookish style and suit-and-tie wardrobe, Gage has become a unique property among Truthers: a quasi-respectable media pundit. In recent years, he’s been featured in mainstream documentaries, and spoken at the Commonwealth Club. Some local television stations have broadcast the film version of his slideshow Blueprint for Truth. Colorado Public Television (KBDI-TV/12) even featured it during a 2009 fundraising drive.
Gage inevitably elicits emotional gasps and shouts with his slideshow. In Montreal, a couple sitting behind me seemed particularly moved. “How can those murderers sleep at night after what they’ve done?” one exclaimed. (She wasn’t talking about al-Qaeda.) Even my own guest on that evening, a conservative-minded sixty-five-year-old woman, seemed transfixed, falling silent at points where I expected she’d be chortling and rolling her eyes.
In one particularly effective segment during his stump presentation, Gage puts up shots of the localized fires that broke out in the lower floors of WTC Building 7 hours before it collapsed. Seconds later, he shows footage of Beijing’s Mandarin Oriental hotel—which suffered an epic top-to-bottom conflagration in 2009, yet remained standing. It’s a cinematic juxtaposition that plays to the Truthers’ strongest card: Even many architects and structural engineers who’ve never heard of Richard Gage will concede that the collapse of WTC 7, a fairly typical 1980s-era structure located about a football field away from WTC 1, was unusual.
Before beginning his presentation in Montreal, Gage had polled the crowd on their views. Five people, including me and my guest, said they believed the “official theory” of 9/11. Ten others said they were “unsure.” Everyone else—about two hundred people—said they believed the WTC came down through “controlled demolition.” Once Gage had finished, he conducted a second poll. This time, when he asked how many people supported the “official theory,” mine was the only hand raised. Shocked, I cast a glance at the friend sitting beside me.
After three hours in a room with Richard Gage, she’d changed her vote to “not sure.”
A few months later, when I sat down with Gage at a Starbucks in the upscale bedroom community of Lafayette, California, I wasn’t sure what to expect. Gage is affable and disarming when surrounded by admirers. But like many cultish true believers, he can become emotionally erratic when his views are probed. At one point during our preceding email exchange, he’d interpreted one of my questions as an “indirect threat” on his life—and furiously threatened to cancel our interview.
But Gage arrived in a calm, friendly mood. After buying himself a soy latte, he sat with me on a bench outside the café for two hours, patiently describing his transformation from workaday commercial architect to 9/11 Truth evangelist.
It was in March 2006 that his life changed, Gage tells me. He was in his car just after lunch, fighting traffic en route to a construction meeting. Bored, he flipped on KPFA 94.1 FM, a listener-supported station out of Berkeley—“to hear what the communists were talking about.”
Up to that point in life, Gage recalls, he’d been just your average workaday architect, with a wife, child, and a strong Republican voting record. “I believed strongly in America,” he tells me. “I believed everything was okay. When Colin Powell was giving his Iraq evidence at the United Nations [in March 2003], I was cheering him on. I wanted us to go to war in Iraq. I wanted to find the WMD. I was completely on board. I was the poster child for George W. Bush’s foreign policy.”
But all that would change.
The voice he heard on KPFA’s airwaves belonged to David Ray Griffin, a retired Claremont School of Theology professor who’s since become a full-time 9/11 Truth activist. “Griffin was logical and methodical—almost grandfatherly,” Gage remembers. “He was talking about the 118 [World Trade Center] first-responders—information that had just come out in 2005—who said they’d heard explosions and flashes of light, beams dripping with molten metal, all amid the collapse of 80,000 tons of structural steel. It hit me like a two-by-four. How come I’d never heard of any of this? I was shocked. I had to pull my car to the side of the road to absorb it all. I knew I’d be late for the meeting. But I didn’t care.”
Within days, Gage was prosletyzing the Truth to everyone who would listen—his family, his friends, even his architectural colleagues at the Walnut Creek firm of Akol & Yoshii. He even began setting up booths at American Institute of Architects meetings, where he’d play video footage of the World Trade Center buildings coming down, and invite skeptical onlookers to sign his AE911Truth petition, which demands a “truly independent investigation” of the 9/11 attacks. Catcalls and mockery were common, Gage remembers—but he didn’t care.
In 2007, Gage cut back on his day job—designing the Summerlin Center Mall in Las Vegas—so that he could spend more time on his activism. Then, in 2008, the project went bankrupt amid the nosediving real estate market, and Gage suddenly was unemployed. Looking back, he says, it was a blessing in disguise: “Making money for large corporations like General Growth was a lot less fulfilling than bringing the truth to people.” Since then, he’s become a full-time Truther, just like Griffin, delivering 9/11 sermons at events across North America.
Gage will admit that he’s paid a price. Friends who failed to embrace his missionary zeal have drifted away. So has his wife, who he said had difficulty accepting his “dark” vision. Gage now lives by himself in a home office near Berkeley, paying his bills with the modest amounts he earns through donations.
Yet when Gage discusses all this, he seems curiously upbeat—almost euphoric—like a Benedictine monk who’s happily renounced the material encumbrances of secular life. Although he doesn’t talk much about his world before 9/11 Truth, he clearly remembers it as empty and unsatisfying.
“I would rather die speaking the truth than live in a police state, which is what 9/11 set the groundwork for,” he tells me in a final, slightly manic flourish. “I can’t have my son—or grandchildren—ask me, ‘What did you do to stop it?’—and I say, ‘I tried to talk to some architects but they wouldn’t listen.’
“I’ve never been happier. I feel blessed, in fact. This is my destiny, my mission. I’ve lost my career. I’ve lost my marriage. I’ve lost my house. But I’m working with patriots, spreading the truth about what’s happened to their country. What more could I ask?”
David Solway: Born-Again Culture Warrior
It was September 12, 2001, by the time David Solway learned that planes had hit the World Trade Center and Pentagon. At the time, the award-winning Canadian writer, then sixty years old, was on the tiny, picturesque Greek island of Tilos (population 350), finishing a book of poems, and watching the local birds circle over the island’s spectacular seascapes.
The next day, he walked into one of the island’s portside kafeneia for breakfast, and looked up at footage of the attacks on the café’s flickering television set. In an instant, he became a different man: “I spent the rest of the day wandering aimlessly about, sensing that the world had changed irrevocably and that there were no more enclaves of safety and recreation, no more ‘Greek islands’ where one could enjoy time out of time,” he later recollected. “I submitted myself, perhaps for the first time in my life, to a kind of Cartesian interrogation, a relentless scrutiny of the values and beliefs I accepted as gospel.”
Until that point in this life, Solway’s political attitudes had hewn faithfully to the left-wing cant expected of a man who makes his living with poetry. He was anti-American, anti-Israeli, antiglobalization. He read Chomsky with approval, railed against George W. Bush, expressed solidarity with the Palestinians, smoked pot, went to demonstrations, lived off government grants. As a young man, he’d even spent time at Berke
ley with Mario Savio during the Free Speech Movement.
As the weeks passed, and the images of the World Trade Center flitted again and again through Solway’s brain, he became convinced that his leftist past had somehow made him complicit in what happened on Sept. 11. He felt ashamed, guilty, useless—overpowering feelings that, he says, “jarred me to the very foundations.”
After returning to Canada, Solway quit his job as a college teacher, put aside his poetry, and began work on manifestos against terrorism. His mortgage payments began to pile up. Lifelong literary friends began to drift away, estranged by the monomania of the erstwhile leftist. But Solway didn’t care. “I wouldn’t accept apostasy—even from a wife,” he told me as his wife silently slipped back and forth between the kitchen and living room, serving us coffee. “I would not accept her living a lie, refusing to uncover the truth. If you can’t do that, you’re not my friend.”
Inevitably, Solway’s search for the truth led him to the Internet. From the right-wing sites he surfed, and his own extensive study of Islamic theology, Solway became convinced that the enemy facing Western civilization wasn’t just al-Qaeda, but Islam itself. In our interview, he described the Koran as a “war manual,” and the Prophet Mohammed as a “master of hatred.”
What’s worse, the Islamists have a stooge on the inside—none other than the president of the United States. Over the last several years, Solway tells me, he’s been collecting a whole “closetful” of information about Barack Obama, all of it pointing to “world cataclysm.”
