Among the Truthers

by Jonathan Kay

  Before dismissing Somers as a Hollywood know-nothing, it’s worth understanding her frame of mind, and how she came to it. The unfortunate fact is that a lot of her impressions about conventional, hospital-based health care practices ring true. The tests and treatments we receive for cancer and other serious ailments are painful and humiliating, just as she says. Often, they aren’t even necessary, but are carried out simply to satisfy the preprinted checklists set out by hospital managers and insurance companies. Many doctors are brusque and patronizing. As anyone who’s spent time with a cancer patient going through chemotherapy and radiation can attest, it’s also true that there is—in Somers’ words—a certain “hopelessness that accompanied so many of today’s approaches to health. Even when they worked, there seemed to be an undesired reaction to the body. Somehow, you weren’t the same person anymore; you became slowed down, aging faster, fragile.” Chemotherapy—which Somers describes, not inaccurately, as “poison therapy”—can be especially traumatic.

  Somers’ mistake—the same one made by many alternative-medicine advocates—is to assume that something that feels artificial and degrading must somehow be harmful to our bodies; and, likewise, that something that feels natural and uplifting must somehow be beneficial. Obviously, every cancer patient in the world would prefer to be drinking vitamin cocktails at a California sweat lodge than lying under a CAT scanner. But that doesn’t mean the former treatment will help us live longer than the latter: The human body is a complex machine, and sometimes the treatments that help us most in the long run are the most excruciating—and even inhumane—in the short run.

  Most people have difficulty dealing with random, purposeless suffering—whether it’s in the form of a great depression, a collapsing skyscraper or a chemo ward. As already discussed in this chapter, medical conspiracy theories of the Suzanne Somers/Jenny McCarthy variety ease our psychic torment in two ways. First, they provide a politically accountable villain. Second, they hold out the possibility of a healthy utopia once the villain’s malign influence has been exposed.

  Best of all, we’re assured, all we need to find this utopia are the five senses: Central to the argument in Knockout and other alternative-health guidebooks is the idea that our own personal intuition about what is right for our bodies, not the scientific analysis provided by the medical establishment, should guide our health choices. Jenny McCarthy encapsulated this approach in 2010, when she airily dismissed a new Pediatrics study authoritatively debunking her theory that autism can be treated with special diets. “We [parents are] the ones seeing the real results. And until doctors start listening to our anecdotal evidence, which is, ‘This is working,’ it’s going to take so many more years for these kids to get better. Every parent will tell you something different that helped their child.”

  Actually, doctors don’t dismiss “anecdotal evidence”: Every data point they collect in their double-blind research studies is, in a broad sense, an “anecdote” drawn from a particular patient, a particular family. Epidemiology is nothing more than the science of systematically collecting and categorizing this information, and using statistical methods to determine what causative factors, if any, are driving the studied variable. But of course, McCarthy and Somers don’t actually mean that we should be studying all anecdotes, or even a randomly selected cross-section of them. They mean we should be studying their anecdotes, and those supplied by the handpicked experts and friends who support their theories.

  The outsized influence of these two women is not a new problem: Social critics have wrung their hands over “celebrity culture” for as long as celebrities have existed. But in recent decades, it gradually has been exacerbated by entirely unrelated cultural phenomena: the rise of the self-help movement, the popularization of psychotherapy, and the attendant notion that our own subjective feelings about life are not only worthy of study, but in fact comprise the key to happiness, and even to truth itself. If this principle rings true on our therapist’s couch, why shouldn’t it ring true in our doctor’s examining room? Both are in the “wellness” business, after all. According to this view, the medical theories of Jenny McCarthy are just as valid as any autism expert’s; the cancer expertise of Suzanne Somers as authoritative as any oncologist’s. More so, in fact, since these two women have lived the conditions they’re writing about, whereas most conventionally credentialed health researchers are merely reporting the results of second-hand information.

  The currency of a celebrity health expert lies not in her credentials, but in her endlessly repeated tale of pain and redemption. This explains why McCarthy, in particular, remains such a popular guest on television talk shows. Oprah Winfrey has made a fetish of what might be called “redemption through suffering”—a doctrine that puts the subjectively felt experience of victimhood at the center of the human condition; and which, like political correctness, makes certain forms of “resistance” narratives immune from intellectual rebuttal. Her guest list over the years has contained a steady parade of female heroines who have overcome some great trial—medical tragedy, racism, childhood sex abuse—and have emerged from it with an inspiring message for ordinary people. This emotional rags-to-riches formula not only supplies compelling human-interest fodder for Oprah’s audience, it also satisfies our spiritual need to find meaning in our suffering (a need once satisfied by religion).

  What makes all of this so maddening to public-health experts is that modern science supplies unprecedented tools for understanding what makes us sick and what doesn’t. In the case of autism, for instance, the search for answers has led to massive metastudies involving hundreds of thousands of children in North America, Europe, and Asia. All of these studies have shown us that vaccine usage has no significant effect on autism rates—yet millions of parents believe otherwise, with the result that some of their children will contract diseases our grandparents once believed had become a thing of the past.

  The Cosmic Voyager

  David Icke was almost forty years old when he learned his true calling. Earlier in life, the Leicester-born Englishman had been a professional soccer goalie for Coventry City and Hereford United, a presenter on the BBC, and a national spokesman for the British Green Party. But everything changed on a psychic’s couch in 1990. At the fateful moment, he remembers, he suddenly felt “something like a cobweb on my face,” and the psychic began getting visions of a “Chinese-looking” figure—a messenger from another dimension, Icke later determined—who had come to tell him that “he is a healer who is here to heal the Earth, and he will be world famous.” Then and there, Icke decided that he had been anointed a prophet.

  Icke’s message is that humans live in a virtual-reality universe—“very well symbolized by the Matrix movie trilogy.” In 1991, he told a journalist that he was the “son of God”—but he insisted that the term was meant with no Christian connotation. “I used the term [to describe my relationship with] the Infinite Consciousness that is everything,” he wrote in his 2010 book, Human Race, Get Off Your Knees: The Lion Sleeps No More. “We are like droplets of water in an ocean of . . . awareness. We are ‘individual’ at one level of perception, but still part of the infinite whole. More than that, we are the infinite whole, just as a droplet is the ocean and the ocean is the droplet.”

  Icke has written sixteen books, and most of them are full of meandering New Age rhapsodies such as this. But unlike ordinary gurus, Icke has wrapped his spiritual message into an ambitious conspiracy theory—one that weaves together the Illuminati, Jews (or “Rothschild Zionists,” as Icke prefers to call them), the Mossad and CIA (which be believes engineered 9/11), and the London School of Economics. The conspiracy is so enormous, he argues, that it transcends the human race: At the top of the pyramid sits an alien race of lizard-people who control the world by projecting their extradimensional identities onto handpicked world leaders such as Queen Elizabeth II and George W. Bush. “ ‘Modern man’ was manipulated genetically by the Reptilian ‘gods’ to be their slaves, and Homo sapiens
were given the brain capacity and physical frame that could best serve the Reptilian[s] as administrators,” he writes in The Lion Sleeps No More. “[The Reptilian brain] acts like an enormous microchip, and locks us into their control system.”

  Fortunately, hope is at hand: According to Icke, “Truth Vibrations” now are being emitted into the “Metaphysical Universe” from distant solar systems—which will help all of us “break down the energetic barriers and blocks and lift the veil on the illusions and secrets about self and the world.” Icke’s mission now, as he sees it, is to get all of us to “tune in” to these vibrations so we can rise up together against the lizard overlords.

  Epitomized by men such as Icke and Ken Jenkins, the Northern California–based New Age film producer profiled in Chapter 3, the Cosmic Voyager is the hippy of conspiracist typology. In broad terms, he resembles what University of York cult expert Colin Campbell called a “seeker”—a spiritual omnivore perpetually spiraling out toward the margins of Western cultural and political life.

  The Cosmic Voyager often will follow eccentric food regimens, dabble in Eastern religious doctrines, and exhibit a pronounced suspicion of conventional medicine. His conspiracism flows naturally from the instinctive sense that the world around us is not what it seems; and that we are all bound together by some kind of unseen natural life force that is being suppressed or degraded by the guardians of our materialistic society. For the Cosmic Voyager, conspiracism is a sort of spaceship ticket to another world—or even another dimension. Since his mythology is vague and labile, he acts as a sort of conspiratorial Zelig, popping up at everything from Truther conventions to quack autism websites.

  Central to the Cosmic Voyager’s worldview is the fictional reconstruction of human history—often according to some foundational myth about an ancient, Edenic society whose inhabitants frolicked about blissfully, until some cataclysm or shadowy cabal dispersed them. In this spirit, Cosmic Voyagers usually become obsessed with Stonehenge, Mayan eschatology, the lost tribes of Israel, Dan Brown-esque Christian pseudohistory, Atlantis, the pyramids of Egypt, Easter Island, and other markers of a supposed master civilization. (Campbell dubbed this hodgepodge “the cultic milieu”—a world “of the occult and the magical, or spiritualism and psychic phenomena, of mysticism and new thought, of alien intelligences and lost civilizations, of faith healing and natural care.”) Like devout Christians awaiting the Messiah’s return, or Shiite Muslims awaiting the return of the twelfth Imam, Cosmic Voyagers imagine that this ur-civilization is not lost in the mists of time, but rather will reawaken and assert itself somehow, either to teach us its ancient wisdom, or (as in the film 2012) render apocalyptic judgment.

  In many cases, the Cosmic Voyager will hybridize with other forms of conspiracy theories to form exotic ideological combinations. Ignatius Donnelly, the prototypical “crank” profiled in the next section, for instance, sometimes would veer into the Cosmic Voyager category when he rhapsodized about the lost civilization of Atlantis. Another notable specimen is failed-historian/cosmic voyager Ernst Zundel, a Holocaust denier who claimed—as one conspiracist website summarized it—“that Hitler and his last battalion had boarded submarines at the end of the war, escaped to Argentina, and then established a base for flying saucers in the hole leading to the inside of the Earth at the South Pole.” Zundel—a by-turns paranoid and affable fellow who happened to live across the street from me during the late 1990s, in the Toronto neighbourhood of Cabbagetown—also suggested “that the Nazis had originated as a separate race that had come from the inner-earth.”

  Some radicalized feminists likewise have fused the Cosmic Voyager’s alternative-minded utopianism with conspiracist man-hatred. Central to this vision is the idea that early Paleolithic civilizations were “Goddess cultures,” in which men and women coexisted in egalitarian bliss, inspired by the kinder, gentler “gynocentric” fertility goddesses that predated (in the words of self-described “radical lesbian feminist” and influential Goddess-cult proponent Mary Daly) the “phallocracy, penocracy, jockocracy, cockocracy, call it whatever—patriarchy.” This hybridized form of conspiracism became further hybridized in the 1980s, when the Goddess cult was grafted on to crackpot interpretations of early Christian history, leading (most famously) to the Da Vinci Code notion that the Vatican has been engaged in a centuries-long cockocratic conspiracy to suppress the “sacred feminine” core of Jesus’ message (but more on that in the next chapter).

  Many Cosmic Voyager conspiracists, such as Icke, are UFO obsessives, and interweave their belief in alien civilizations with their suspicion of our own (human) government in intricate ways. A central theme in many of these conspiracy theories is that America’s political leaders are in contact with space visitors, but that this fact has been hidden from the rest of us.

  Lurid as these science-fiction fantasies may be, they dovetail with the Cosmic Voyager’s more general, overarching belief that the world we see is merely a fragment of some much deeper reality. Just as a conventional New Order conspiracy theorist sees Barack Obama and George W. Bush as puppets for some shadowy petro-industrial cabal, a UFO conspiracist sees mankind itself as a mere pawn in a giant galactic space opera.

  The Clinical Conspiracist

  Only a small minority of the Truthers I encountered seemed out-and-out insane. This should not be surprising: The 9/11 Truth movement is a socially constructed conspiracist phenomenon—cobbled together on the Internet from the contributions of thousands of different people. Genuinely insane paranoiacs usually cannot take part in this sort of collaborative effort because they are incapable of extended social interaction in any medium. And so, their paranoid fantasies tend to be highly personalized narratives of their own individual construction—typically involving spouses, relatives, landlords, and work colleagues.

  When clinically insane individuals do take a prominent role in conspiracist movements, it typically is in the early stages, when they can work their own idiosyncratic notions into the movement’s foundational mythology. A famous example in this category is L. Ron Hubbard, who wove the “religion” of Scientology out of his own paranoid obsessions regarding psychiatrists, “suppressive persons,” and 75-million-year-old intergalactic ghosts. Another is Delia Bacon, the emotionally unglued (yet strangely influential) Connecticut Congregationalist who spent much of her life preaching the notion that William Shakespeare’s plays and poems actually had been written by Francis Bacon (no relation) and his friends—before she died in a lunatic asylum at the age of forty-eight. The Truther movement has included several similarly unhinged specimens—including British Truther David Shayler, a former MI5 officer-turned-peace activist who now believes that “no planes were involved in 9/11.” (He insists they were holograms.) In 2007, he came forward with the claim that he is “the messiah,” and possesses “the secret of eternal life.”

  In some cases, the preoccupations of insane individuals have filtered into the wider conspiracist community, and have become part of its baseline lore. This includes the idea that government agents are continually monitoring our communications, and even, somehow, our private thoughts, with secret implants or with microchips inserted into our bloodstream—a fear sometimes observed in schizophrenics. And as noted previously, some conspiracy theorists support the notion that the government creates “doubles” (and even triples) of alleged murderers such as Lee Harvey Oswald and Mohammed Atta—a suspicion somewhat analogous to Capgras syndrome, whereby the afflicted imagine that family members have been replaced by doppelgängers. Echoes of the same phenomena can be found in the fringe Truther theory, championed by the aforementioned Alexander Dewdney and others, that the 9/11 hijacking “victims” who called their relatives in the minutes before their deaths were CIA actors.

  The telltale indicator of genuine clinical insanity lies with the structure of the conspiracist narrative. Sane conspiracists subconsciously erect a rigid mental firewall that insulates their real day-to-day lives from the life-and-death implications of their fa
ntasies: The resulting doublethink allows them to sleep at night and maintain productive, functional lives without succumbing to the dread fear that their government will punish their truth-seeking activism with murder. (Indeed, one of the great ironies of the Truth movement is that its activists typically hold their meetings in large, unsecured locations such as college auditoriums—even as they insist that government agents will stop at nothing to protect their conspiracy for world domination from discovery.) Truly disturbed conspiracy theorists, on the other hand, can’t sustain that firewall. They weave themselves into the fantasy, usually as both hero and target.

  The best example I have come across is veteran conspiracy theorist Michael Ruppert, whose 2004 book, Crossing the Rubicon: The Decline of the American Empire at the End of the Age of Oil, likely ranks as the most influential Truther tome ever published. (Ruppert says it has sold more than one hundred thousand copies.) From a commercial perspective, his psychological state sits in a perfect sweet spot: He is psychologically balanced enough to write lucidly and command a following with his books, but also sufficiently delusional to imagine himself at the center of fantastic, Hollywood-style cloak-and-dagger narratives.

  Ruppert’s descent into paranoia began in 1976, with a woman. At the time, Ruppert was a rookie LAPD narcotics detective with stellar performance evaluations and a bright future. Then, during an evening out at Brennan’s Bar in Marina del Ray, he met “Teddy,” and fell in love. After the two became engaged, the relationship soured, and Teddy headed east, to New Orleans. Unable to make phone contact, Ruppert hopped on a plane in romantic pursuit—and entered what he describes as a “Dantean” demimonde of James Bond intrigue, one he seems to inhabit to this day. “Arriving in New Orleans, I found her living in an apartment across the river from the Gretna. Equipped with a scrambler phone and night vision devices, and working from sealed communiqués delivered by naval and air force personnel from nearby Belle Chasse Naval Air Station, she was involved in something truly ugly. She was arranging for large quantities of weapons to be loaded onto ships leaving for Iran. The ships were owned by a company that is today a subsidiary of Halliburton—Brown and Root. She was working with Mafia associates of New Orleans Mafia boss Carlos Marcello to coordinate the movement of service boats that were bringing large quantities of heroin into the city. The boats arrived regularly at Marcello-controlled docks, unmolested by the New Orleans police she introduced me to. Through her I also met hard-hat drivers, military men, Brown and Root employees, former Green Berets, and CIA personnel . . . Disgusted and heartbroken at witnessing my fiancée and my government smuggling drugs, I ended the relationship.”