Among the Truthers

by Jonathan Kay

  Like religious fundamentalists and cult members, Truther activists tend to observe a rigid distinction between believers and infidels—between those with the courage to embrace the Truth and those who prefer to wallow in ignorance. As with Marxists who accuse nonbelievers of inhabiting a “false consciousness,” many Truthers see non-Truther “sheeple” as not merely misinformed, but mentally deficient in some very basic way.

  Yet enlightenment comes with a price. Regarding the actual moment when the truth dawned upon them, Truthers typically describe a complex mix of pride, psychic agony, and spiritual delirium—a phenomenon that can be observed in many conspiracist movements. In her study of UFO conspiracy theorists, for instance, American political scientist Jodi Dean found that “for most [self-reported UFO] abductees, the struggle over the real is interminable, ceaseless, an entangled process of tracing and retracing signs and events . . . At the same time, certain pleasures accompany abductees’ break with conventional reality. Not only do they find themselves in the thick of conspiracies of global political significance, not only are they now important historical figures . . . but they are no longer duped by ‘the system.’ ”

  During my interviews, a surprising number of Truthers spun the same cinematic metaphor when describing this choice—the scene in the 1999 film The Matrix in which the heroes offer hallucinating slaves a simple pharmacological choice with existential consequences: “You take the blue pill, the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill, you stay in Wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes.” Truthers commonly use the term “awake” to describe their embrace of conspiracist mythology—implying that their previous life comprised an artificial dream state not unlike the suspended animation imposed on Keanu Reeves’ Neo.

  But for some, the red pill proves too powerful a narcotic—and they lapse melodramatically into another Church-inspired role: the martyr.

  The Protocols supplies an early prototype—Victor E. Marsden, the mysterious journalist who produced the most widely distributed English-language version of the WWI-era fraud. In a preface to Marsden’s translation, which still circulates widely on the Internet, an admirer writes of the man’s heroic efforts to escape Soviet Russia and communicate the truth to the English-speaking world: “It may be said with truth that this work was carried out at the cost of Mr. Marsden’s own life’s blood. He told the writer of this Preface that he could not stand more than an hour at a time of his work on it in the British Museum, as the diabolical spirit of the matter which he was obliged to turn into English made him positively ill. [In 1920], he was taken suddenly ill, and died after a very brief illness. May this work be his crowning monument!”

  Many modern conspiracy theorists I’ve met similarly describe sickness or debilitating emotional agony that they blame on sudden exposure to the magnitude of evil threatening the world. “For three years I worked on this book, and the facts threaded through the fiction made me physically ill,” writes Steve Alten in the “personal message” contained at the beginning of his Truther novel The Shell Game. “Three months after the original manuscript was finished, I was diagnosed with Parkinson’s Disease. I was only 47, with no family history of the disease.”

  Likewise, Daniel Estulin, whose conspiracy theories about the Bilderberg Group were described in Chapter 1, writes of the “unimaginable hardships” he has endured “to expose the Bilderbergers’ master plan for Global Government and One World Order.” As he prepares for yet another stakeout at one of the group’s annual conferences—this one in Stresa, Italy, in 2004—he lapses into the language of Revelation, with a lachrymose dose of self-congratulation: “Incoherent images danced in my head. Total Enslavement, Manmade famines that swept millions to their grave. Suffering, more suffering. Unspeakable human sacrifice. Why? Is it really possible that someone might want to inflict so much pain on the world for personal gain? As I struggled to hold back tears, I kept reminding myself that my quest for the truth was a vindication of decency at the expense of greed and power.”

  Michael Ruppert, too, has become something of a self-styled martyr since his days leading the 9/11 Truth movement in the early years after 9/11. Though he was briefly married in the mid–1990s, he lives alone now, in a tidy house that he shares with no one besides a dog. “No woman—no human being alive—could walk through what I was doing, could travel that path,” he told me by way of explanation as we spoke in his living room. “Lots of poverty. Stress like you cannot believe. My whole life was taken away from me when I was twenty-seven. My attitude was ‘I’ll just put my personal life on hold till I straighten out this CIA and drug shit’—and here I am, thirty years later. I don’t think I’m being boastful that when I say that of all the activists out there, I’ve had as much or more impact, but that came at a horrible price.”

  The Cultic Milieu

  My argument in this chapter has been that conspiracy theories provide believers with many of the same psychological comforts as religion. Like many faiths, conspiracism supplies adherents with a Manichean moral structure, a satanic explanation for evil, and the promise of utopia. But since they do not require believers to express faith in an actual deity, they are well suited for our secular age.

  Conspiracism is different from conventional religious faiths in at least one other respect, however: It is inherently unstable.

  Because the conspiracy theorist is driven by a need to smash the façade of conventional reality and existing power structures, he is forever seeking to probe deeper than his peers, to uncover truths that they are not quite bold enough to confront. This is why conspiracist networks, like radical revolutionary movements, are prone to continual schism, with members on all sides accusing one another of being secretly in league with the evildoers.

  Jew-hating conspiracy theorists, for instance, are forever outing one another as closet Jews. During infighting at the Holocaust-denying Journal of Historical Review in the mid–1990s, claims were traded about which side was in the pay of the Anti-Defamation League. More recently, anti-Semitic Truther Eric Hufschmid has claimed that Ernst Zundel is a “Zionist agent.” Meanwhile, Hufschmid’s anti-Semitic naysayers claim he is “a member of the Jewish criminal network that he claims to expose.” (One website set up in 2009 is actually called “Eric Hufschmid works for the Jews.”)

  A similar pattern plays out among Shakespeare conspiracists, who in the early twentieth century began abandoning Francis Bacon as the true Great Bard, and instead focused on Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford. These Oxfordians, in turn, schismed in the 1930s over the so-called Prince Tudor theory, which had it that Oxford and Queen Elizabeth were in fact the parents of the (illegitimate) Earl of Southampton—following which came a yet more elaborate theory (“Prince Tudor, Part II”), according to which Oxford was both Elizabeth’s lover and son. (As James Shapiro explains in Contested Will, the Prince Tudor theories help clarify Oxfordians’ status as—what I call—failed historians: “If Oxford had been given his due in his own day, and his son Southampton had ascended to the throne upon their mother’s death in 1603, perhaps Britain might have avoided an irreversible breakdown in hierarchy and order that led to a wrenching Civil War, and subsequently to the rise of modernity, imperialism, and capitalism”—all of these creeds being the bugbear of Positivists, and in particular, of the Oxfordians’ authoritarian, medievalist guru, J. T. Looney.)

  The wider Truth movement exhibits the same dynamic. Though less than a decade old, it already has split into anti-Israeli and anti-anti-Israeli factions; into an older, left-wing, anti-American wing and a younger, right-wing, libertarian wing; between those who insist that Truther activism should focus on the internal demolition of the Twin Towers, and those who entertain more exotic theories involving space weapons and cruise missiles. The most common tactic in these schismatic battles is the cloak-and-dagger accusation that the other side has been compromised by “COINTELPRO”—an acronym for Counter Intelligence Program, which refers t
o a covert Cold War–era FBI program aimed at covertly infiltrating and discrediting dissident political organizations.

  At the same time, these conspiracists also tend to be perennially on the search for entirely unrelated theories that nourish their gut sense that mainstream society is counterfeit and morally bankrupt. And so a conspiracist whose initial obsession revolved around Jews may eventually migrate toward conspiracy theories involving water fluoridation and vaccines. Or a JFK conspiracy theorist may become convinced the government is hiding evidence of UFO landings. Often these “migratory” conspiracists will combine their new and old obsessions in bizarre and unique ways—blurring the lines of the typology I supplied in the previous chapter.

  At Truther events, I make a special point of browsing the DVDs being sold by the vendors who inevitably set up shop in the back of the room. Truther classics such as Loose Change and 9/11: Blueprint For Truth were always brisk sellers. But so, too, are Vaccine Nation (which promotes the myth that vaccines cause autism), Vatican Assassins (contending the assassination of JFK was “ordered by the Jesuit General and executed by Pope Paul VI”), and Children of the Matrix: How an Interdimensional Race Has Controlled the World for Thousands of Years . . . And Still Does (whose title, I think, is self-explanatory). Another popular genre is the pseudohistory that British author Damian Thompson calls “hyperdiffusionism”—which postulates that all of the West’s greatest cultural achievements and archeological artifacts originate from some mysterious ancient civilization (Atlantis is a popular choice, largely thanks to the nineteenth-century writings of Ignatius Donnelly) whose forebears roamed the earth in ancient times.

  For many conspiracists I encountered, the hopscotch from one theory to the next becomes a sort of addiction—with the promise of total enlightenment always being just another mouse click or DVD away. On a web forum created for ex-Truthers by the James Randi Educational Foundation, for instance, one contributor described his pinballing through the various species of conspiracism and New Age hocus-pocus this way:

  It [started] with Google/Google videos of 9/11. During the afternoons I just couldn’t stop watching that. And from [Loose Change] I went to Alex Jones’ [radio show] and I was curious about his claims, so I listened to him. And I just took in everything he said. From Info wars to skull and bones to Owl worshiping. I took it all in. I got to the Bilderberg group, then black helicopters interacting with lights near crop circles, then abductions and UFO videos to New Age interpretations of them, then [eschatological theories of] 2012. I became a Raelian at one point, seeing design in nature (these aliens supposedly created every tree and bird and animal thanks to their creativity), and from the Elohim (the aliens of the Raelian cult) I went to Greys [humanoid aliens visiting earth] and . . . the reptilians. Of course, the reptilians were behind every triangular architecture and ancient symbolics found ANYWHERE, including Mars, and probably were the Illuminati, thinking of taking over the world with a New World Order, using Fugifilm zeppelins with some occult technology to look into our houses and spread mind controlling poison through contrails. Obviously, 9/11 was just one step in their plan . . . I was, what? 16, 17? [My mother] would shake her head with [laughter] when I told her that I knew a lot more than her. Now, I understand her.

  It’s a sad story, but at least it has a happy ending. Most Truthers who set off down the rabbit hole never come back.

  Part III

  Accessories to Trutherdom

  In Part I of this book, I described the history of conspiracism, and its changing face from the French Revolution to the post-9/11 era. In Part II, in which the focus narrowed from the sociological to the psychological, I analyzed the motives and belief systems of individual conspiracy theorists. My goal throughout was to show how conspiracism threatens the intellectual foundations of rationalism by eroding the baseline presumption that we all inhabit the same reality.

  In the next three chapters, I will analyze why rationalism has given way to conspiracism so readily—even in the face of a trio of intellectual trends once expected to render superstitious and hateful ideologies obsolete: the rise of information technology, widespread access to higher education, and the enshrinement of tolerance and diversity as state-sanctioned secular creeds.

  Chapter Seven

  Democratizing Paranoia: How the Web Revolutionized Conspiracism

  The Legacy of Flight 800

  On July 17, 1996, Trans World Airlines Flight 800 took off from JKF airport in New York en route to Leonardo da Vinci Airport in Rome, climbed toward an altitude of about 15,000 feet, and then exploded near the Long Island town of East Moriches. All 230 people on board were killed.

  Many Americans immediately assumed the tragedy was a terrorist attack. Several eyewitnesses said they saw a streak of light heading upward in the seconds before the aircraft exploded. But after a lengthy investigation, the FBI announced they’d found no evidence of a criminal act. The National Transportation Safety Board eventually concluded that Flight 800 probably exploded due to an explosion within a fuel tank set off by faulty wiring.

  But the controversy surrounding TWA Flight 800 refused to die. To this day, conspiracy theorists insist the NTSB organized a cover-up to protect the U.S. Navy, which supposedly downed the plane with a missile. In 1997, a retired police officer even broke into a hangar housing the reconstructed wreckage of Flight 800 to steal seat-fabric samples that he believed would help disprove the official theory. The next year, the prestigious New York Review of Books published an article by a Harvard English professor suggesting that Flight 800 had been brought down by electromagnetic interference from a passing military aircraft. Others theorized that the incident was connected to the upcoming trial of Ramzi Yousef, who was then awaiting trial for his role in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing—and that the FBI had been tipped off in advance.

  The swirl of suspicion and confusion initially surrounding the tragedy was understandable. The destruction of the aircraft seemed to resemble a number of earlier terrorist attacks, including the Lockerbie bombing of 1988. Just a month previous, terrorists had blown up the Khobar Towers housing complex in Saudi Arabia, killing nineteen U.S. servicemen. The year before, Timothy McVeigh had blown up the Oklahoma City federal building. The Atlanta Olympics—a ripe terrorist target—were just two days away. Terrorism was on America’s mind.

  But there was another exacerbating factor, as well, one that would herald a new era for all species of conspiracists: the release of the Netscape Navigator web browser in late 1994, and the explosive growth of the World Wide Web that would immediately follow. For the first time, conspiracists were able to get their theories into the public sphere instantly. As Eastern Illinois University scholar Shane Miller concluded in a published analysis of the Flight 800–themed websites that came online in late 1996 and the years following, “this was the first major conspiracy of the internet age.”

  Over the last decade and a half, the Internet has utterly transformed conspiracism—no less than it’s transformed pornography, music distribution, journalism, and social networking. Prior to the mid–1990s, conspiracy theorists pursued their investigations in isolated obscurity, typing out manifestoes on basement card tables, or amid the nonfiction stacks at their local library. The stigma associated with their craft, in conjunction with the communications limitations predating the World Wide Web, meant that each conspiracist was essentially a unique movement unto himself, his ideas mutating and evolving without social input from others—like an obscure species of land animal confined to a remote island.

  Just about every author in the field of JFK conspiracism, for instance, has the president dying in a somewhat different way, at the hands of a customized menagerie of secret agents, gangsters, and Cubans (a state of conspiracist confusion captured nicely by a faux headline in the Onion, datelined in 1963: “Kennedy slain by CIA, Mafia, Castro, LBJ, Teamsters, Freemasons: President shot 129 times from 43 different angles”).

  Flight 800 marked the moment that the solitary aspect of
the conspiracist métier ended. Amid the plethora of newly blooming blogs and discussion fora, the construction of conspiracy theories became a collective exercise—what modern computer scientists would call an “open source” project. Rather than authors offering their own scattered, mutually incompatible, proprietary ideas, they began operating within a collaborative network, much like the editors and contributors who produce Linux and Wikipedia. All of the tiny little islands of paranoia suddenly were linked up by virtual causeways.

  One result is that elaborate conspiracy theories now can be cobbled together literally overnight through the efforts of hundreds of scattered dilettante conspiracists. Another result is that conspiracists all around the world now tend to focus on the same few dozen talking points that figure prominently on the top websites.

  Within only a few weeks of investigating the Truth movement, for instance, I found I already was hearing the same handful of 9/11 “anomalies” recited to me over and over from emerging Truther factions—Larry Silverstein’s use of the words “pull it,” the molten WTC metal that could only have been melted with thermite, the neat collapse of WTC 7, the failure of NORAD to intercept the hijacked jets. In the case of JFK, and even the French Revolution, conspiracists still can’t agree on who gets the blame—despite the passage of generations. Yet with the 9/11 Truth movement, it took only months for conspiracists to collectively declare J’accuse at the trio of Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and Paul Wolfowitz.

  The Internet has produced a radical democratization of the conspiracist marketplace of ideas. No longer does one have to spend years researching and writing a book to attract attention: One can simply set up a blog, or chime in on someone else’s, with some refinement of the existing collective lore. In fact, today’s conspiracists don’t even have to read books—they can pick up all their talking points from Truther websites, or, better yet, from Truther propaganda videos. Memoirs Illustrating the History of Jacobinism, Augustin Barruel’s 1798-99 classic conspiracist opus about the French Revolution, ran for thousands of pages, and took weeks to read. The Warren Commission report ran to twenty-six volumes. Watching the latest edition of Loose Change, on the other hand, takes about an hour and a half.