by Jonathan Kay
It’s hard to say whether any of this is true—or whether the entire episode wasn’t an extended psychotic delusion: After interviewing the man for two hours at his small, tidy Culver City, California, home, I’m still not sure. But it’s beyond question that the trauma of this romantic breakup turned this once up-and-coming law enforcement officer into a full-time paranoiac. Within two years of meeting “Teddy,” Ruppert checked himself into a psychiatric hospital, complaining about death threats. Soon thereafter, he left the LAPD, and began peddling different versions of his story—including the contention that the CIA tried to recruit him to protect its L.A.-area drug operations—to whatever credulous journalists would listen.
As noted previously, he jumped early and hard onto the Truther bandwagon following 9/11, touring college campuses on the West Coast as early as November 2001. In that early period, he developed key tenets of the movement’s mythology—such as the notion that the attacks were the brainchild of Dick Cheney, and that the planes were flown by remote control. He even claimed to have developed a source—a small-time criminal and con artist named Delmart Vreeland, a man that JFK conspiracy buffs might describe as the Rose Cheramie of 9/11 conspiracy mythology—who could prove foreknowledge of the 9/11 attacks.
Like Estulin and other megalomaniacal paranoiacs, Ruppert describes his life as a cycle of near-death experiences and epic triumphs. He’s been targeted by secret-service assassins several times, he says—most recently in Switzerland in 2003. While in “exile” in Hugo Chavez’s Venezuela a few years back, he claims to have been poisoned with a local drug called Burandenga (“picture a date-rape drug times fifty,” he tells me). He describes black helicopters circling overhead when he meets with other “insiders,” and claims that the government attacked the offices of his (now defunct) website, From the Wilderness, using “microwave weapons.” He also casually compares himself to Lenin, and claims that his investigations led to the resignation of Donald Rumsfeld.
The Crank
“Angry” is an adjective often used to describe the current state of American politics. But nothing in today’s Washington could possibly compare with a speech delivered to Congress in 1868 by Ignatius Donnelly, Republican congressman for Minnesota’s Second Congressional District. Rising before his peers to rebut charges of impropriety made against him by Illinois congressman Elihu Washburne, Donnelly fulminated thusly:
If anywhere on God’s earth, down in the mire of filth and nastiness, [Washburne] can pluck up anything that touches my honor, let it come. I shall meet it on its merits. I have gone through the entire catalogue; I have analyzed the contents of the gentleman’s foul stomach. I have dipped my hand into its gall; I have examined the half-digested fragments that I have found floating in the gastric juices; but if it is possible for the peristaltic actions of the gentleman from Illinois to bring up anything more loathsome, more disgusting than he has vomited over me [already], in God’s name, let it come . . . If there be in our midst one low, sordid, vulgar soul; one barren, mediocre intelligence; one heart callous to every kindly sentiment and every generous impulse, one tongue leprous with slander; one mouth which like unto a den of foul beast giving forth deadly odors; if there be one character which, while blotched and spotted all over, yet raves and rants and blackguards like a prostitute; if there be here one bold, bad, empty bellowing demagogue, it is the gentleman from Illinois.
Donnelly, who already had developed a reputation in Washington as a loose cannon, flamed out of national politics shortly thereafter. Yet the meltdown proved a blessing in disguise, for it allowed him to follow the calling for which he was ideally suited: crankdom.
Even during his career as a politician, Donnelly spent much of his time in the Library of Congress, devouring the contents stack by stack. After returning to his home in rural Minnesota, he became a bookworm full time, developing a particular interest in life under the ocean. Out of this obsession came his 490-page epic, Atlantis: The Antediluvian World, in which Donnelly instructed readers
That Atlantis was the region where man first rose from a state of barbarism to civilization; that it became, in the course of ages, a populous and mighty nation, from whose overflowings the shores of the Gulf of Mexico, the Mississippi River, the Amazon, the Pacific coast of South America, the Mediterranean, the west coast of Europe and Africa, the Baltic, the Black Sea, and the Caspian were populated by civilized nations; that It was the true antediluvian world, the Garden of Eden; that the gods and goddesses of the ancient Greeks, the Phoenicians, the Hindus, and the Scandinavians were simply the kings, queens and heroes of Atlantis; and the acts attributed to them in mythology, a confused recollection of real historical events; . . . that Atlantis perished in a terrible convulsion of nature, in which the whole island was submerged in the ocean, with nearly all its inhabitants; that a few persons escaped in ships and on rafts, and carried to the nations east and west tidings of the appalling catastrophe.
The book became a best seller, going through dozens of editions. (It remains in print to this day as a staple of New Age reading lists.) But Donnelly was just getting started. From his home in Minnesota, the “Prince of Cranks” (as he later was dubbed) followed up Atlantis with Ragnarok: Age of Fire and Gravel, which argued that Atlantis was destroyed by a passing comet, and that the contours of our earth were formed by a massive barrage of extraterrestrial gravel. Then came Caesar’s Column—the dystopic protoscience-fiction novel discussed in Chapter 1–which warned humanity about the catastrophic revolution that would come if America did not reform its political system. A few years later, he produced an arcane anti-Stratfordian manifesto called The Great Cryptogram, in which Donnelly tried to prove—by counting and multiplying the number of different kinds of words in Shakespeare’s plays—that Francis Bacon had encoded a secret cipher proving his authorship of the Bard’s entire oeuvre. By the time Donnelly died on New Year’s Day, 1901, in fact, he had put his stamp on just about every strain of conspiracism and crankdom that would emerge in the eleven decades following his death.
And yet, as you read through Donnelly’s life story—as told in Martin Ridge’s 1962 biography, Portrait of a Politician—it’s hard not to root for the man. He’s not exactly a likeable character (as Elihu Washburne might have attested). But he did have the quality then known as pluck—what today we would call chutzpah. “Donnelly genuinely believed he was a genius, and that, by applying his mental powers to any problem, no matter how tangled or intractable, and regardless of the established body of relevant scholarship or scientific tradition, he could solve it with a fresh look,” is how J. M. Tyree put it in a 2005 essay. “Congressman, master orator, pseudo-scientist, student of comparative mythology, crackpot geologist, futurist, amateur literary sleuth, bogus cryptologist, Donnelly did it all with a charmingly boundless energy and a voracious intellectual appetite.”
In his fearless commitment to truth-seeking (as he imagined it), Donnelly personified one of America’s defining intellectual traditions. America, it is important to remember, has always been a land of cranks. Just as capitalism and the industrial revolution set every yeoman free to build a better musket or mousetrap in his barn or basement, the American Enlightenment set loose a million eccentrics to sweep away the dogmas inherited from Europe, with each championing his own cobbled-together religious movement, political party, or civic group.
As a conspiracist, the crank’s defining feature is an acute, inveterately restless, furiously contrarian intelligence. Many cranks have an Asperger’s-like obsession with arithmetic, flowcharts, maps, and lengthy data lists. Like Donnelly, they are unable to take any expert’s word on even the most technical subject. The crank can be satisfied only once he has personally established the truth of his theories using nothing but primary sources and the rules of logic.
What drives cranks on an emotional level isn’t the substance of their theories: Many of the Truther cranks I’ve interviewed—including David Ray Griffin, Barrie Zwicker, and Paul Zarembka, all discussed in this bo
ok—treated the issue of 9/11 Truth in large part as a debating exercise, and seemed curiously detached from the profoundly disturbing implications that flow from their claims. What cranks truly crave is the exhilarating sense of independence, control, and superiority that come from declaring oneself a self-sufficient intellectual force. Conspiracism is a natural outlet for this craving since conspiracy theories always exist in opposition to some received truth that enjoys the blessing of experts, and because the associated claims are regarded as daring and controversial.
Cranks typically are intellectual workaholics—“independent researcher” is how they often refer to these activities—furiously endeavoring to master all of the specialized knowledge required to prove their theories from first principles. Over the years, their homes become transformed into archives, overrun with great stacks of research materials. Within conspiracy movements, they comprise the role of “back office,” churning out the tracts that less dedicated and energetic conspiracy theorists use as their source material. Cranks rarely are bigoted or hateful in their attitudes—but their penchant for fringe crusades sometimes draws them into movements that answer to these descriptives. (A textbook example is writer Joseph Sobran [1946–2010], who gained renown as a stylist and conservative thinker at the National Review under William F. Buckley Jr., but who slid into crankdom during the 1990s. In his final years, he became so thoroughly detached from reality that he saw nothing wrong with appearing at Holocaust-denier conferences alongside full-fledged anti-Semites.)
Social interactions with cranks usually are memorable. One of the oddest interviews I conducted for this book was with Barrie Zwicker, an amiable crank who became Canada’s leading 9/11 Truther in the aftermath of a long career as a mainstream journalist. When I spoke with him at his cluttered Toronto home, he announced that he would be interviewing me (about my nonbelief in Trutherdom) in parallel with my own questions. As we talked, he hit buttons on a chess clock to regulate our usage of time—making sure we each questioned the other for exactly the same number of minutes. For reasons that seem obvious to me from such experiences, there are no crank women, only crank men.
Typically, the crank is a math teacher, computer scientist, chess player, or investigative journalist—careers in which the mind is trained to tease complex patterns out of empirical data. Like Donnelly, many come to their crankdom in middle age, or at the end of their working lives, as they are casting about for some project to occupy their hyperactive brains. In some cases, cranks are high-functioning intellectuals frustrated by a menial profession (the most notorious example being the voluble taxi driver with a crank theory about every news item that comes across his radio).
Marshall McLuhan—the communications theorist who told us “the medium is the message”—was a classic crank: He spent much of his leisure time scanning the personals columns in Toronto newspapers, seeking out coded messages about the time and place for “black masses” where, he believed, the Masons and other secret societies would meet to hatch their conspiracies. McLuhan’s obsession with the Masons, politely ignored by most of the scholars who’ve analyzed his life and work, is described in Philip Marchand’s biography, The Medium and the Messenger. According to Marchand, McLuhan believed that the American Civil War had really been a feud between Masonry’s northern and southern branches; and—closer to home—that Masons “controlled book reviews in important periodicals.”
McLuhan’s obsession with book reviewers is telling, since many mainstream intellectuals get pushed into crankdom by the conviction that they are being unfairly ignored or disparaged by their peers. In the current age, liberal arts professors who have spent their careers laboring in fusty academic obscurity, in particular, find they are able to become instant YouTube superstars merely by adding some sensational twist on an established conspiracy movement—all without having to go through the lengthy, frustrating process of legitimate peer review.
“If you look at a lot of the leading characters in the [9/11 Truth]movement, they tend to be people who are smart but never really got to the top [in their field],” says James Bennett, one of the cocreators of the well-traveled anti-Truther blog Screw Loose Change. “Look at [former Brigham Young University physicist] Steven Jones. He had his brush with fame [in the mid-80s] with cold fusion. But it didn’t pan out. And it became a miniscandal in the scientific community. He almost accomplished something. But now he’s in the Truth movement. He’s lauded by thousands. He gives speeches. People talk about him in the same breath as Gandhi and Jesus.”
Even when the crank is ignored or shunned, he derives satisfaction from the sense that he possesses secret truths about the world that ordinary people are too cowardly to accept. “Throughout the fringe movements that I’ve seen—whether it’s the 9/11 Truth movement, or New Age theories, or Holocaust revisionism—the people tend to have something in common: They think they’re smarter than the average person,” says Phil Molé, a Chicago-based freelance writer and veteran debunker who investigated the 9/11 Truth movement for a 2006 article in Skeptic magazine. “And often they are smarter than the average person. They usually have some professional success under their belt. They’ve earned a degree. They think they’re entitled to interpret things the way they see it—that they can declare everyone else to be wrong. The fact they happen to be smart doesn’t deter them from conspiracy theories. Just the opposite: It enables them. It shields them in their own mind from criticism. They think that the reason these other people are criticizing them is, ‘They just don’t get it. They’re not as smart as I am. They don’t know the things I know.’
“In the 9/11 Truth movement, you see a lot of that. These are people who pride themselves on being well informed. They read lots of stuff—a lot of it is just regurgitated from other 9/11 Truth sites, but they do read something. They can tell you exactly where such and such a plane was on such and such a day, or what was going on in Afghanistan at such and such a time. It’s all isolated scraps of information, of course. But they pride themselves on having all these scattered facts in their brains. So they tell themselves, ‘Where do other people get off telling me that I’m wrong?’ ”
Truther-wise, the leading crank is the dean of 9/11 Truth authors, David Ray Griffin. To this day, Griffin is known as one of the world’s foremost experts in the field of Process Theology, a complex metaphysical discipline that defines God in relation to the exercise of free will. After retiring from the Claremont School of Theology in California, he filled his days by taking up conspiracism full time. His work ethic is legendary: When I visited him at his seaside California home in 2009, he told me that he sometimes spends fourteen-hour days on his research. (During our interview, he spoke to me for three hours straight—and seemed prepared to speak for hours more had I not gotten up to leave.) Since 2004, he has written no fewer than eleven books, in which he methodically examines virtually every minute of the 9/11 timeline—much as Donnelly examined every word of King Lear and Othello. The table of contents for his 2008 book 9/11 Contradictions: An Open Letter to Congress and the Press, for instance, includes these chapters:
1. How long did George Bush remain in the classroom?
2. When did Dick Cheney enter the underground bunker?
3. Was Cheney observed confirming a stand-down order?
4. Did Cheney observe the land-all-planes order?
5. When did Cheney issue shoot down authorization?
6. Where was General Richard Myers?
7. Where was Donald Rumsfeld?
8. Did Ted Olson receive calls from Barbara Olson?
9. When was the military alerted about Flight 11?
10. When was the military alerted about Flight 175?
11. When was the military alerted about Flight 77?
12. When was the military alerted about Flight 93?
13. Could the military have shot down Flight 93?
SUNY Buffalo economics professor Paul Zarembka takes an even more granular approach to his Truther research, dwelling at length on
such arcane subjects as the price of individual airline stocks in the run-up to 9/11, and the tail numbers of the hijacked 9/11 aircraft, both of which he discusses at numbing length in his 2008 book The Hidden History of 9/11. To quote at random: “AA 11 is listed with tail number N334AA. Returning to BTS data, it had arrived into Boston from S.F. at 5:52 a.m. on 9–10 (as AA 198), judging from airborne time. While BTS data do not report arrival into Dulles (any time in September 2001) of an aircraft with tail number N644AA, airgames.bravehost.com ascertained that the FAA tail number N644AA is replaced in American Airlines reporting procedures by N5BPAA . . .”
Another (unusually young) 9/11 crank is Craig Ranke—a manic, elfin, endearingly odd thirtysomething software salesman who proudly introduced himself to me at a New York City Truth forum as the founder of an outfit called the 9/11 “Citizen Investigation Team.” At the time we met, he’d spent the last three years of his life investigating little else besides the flight path of American Airlines Flight 77, in hopes of proving that no plane ever hit the Pentagon. As with other cranks I’ve met, Ranke is certain that his narrow area of interest is the sardine-can key that will roll up the whole of the conspiracy.
