Among the Truthers

by Jonathan Kay

  —Vincent Bugliosi, Reclaiming History: The Assassination of President John F. Kennedy

  A Pound of Cure

  On July 17, 1983, a small Indian newspaper called the Patriot published a letter bearing the headline “AIDS may invade India: Mystery disease caused by U.S. experiments.” The author—who requested anonymity, but described himself as “a well-known American scientist”—declared that AIDS had been created by the U.S. Army at its Fort Detrick, Maryland, testing facility, and warned that Washington was poised to transfer this potent new bioweapon to the government of neighboring Pakistan. While the letter went unnoticed in the West, it was picked up by the Soviet newspaper Literaturnaya Gazeta, and then by an energetic East German microbiologist named Jakob Segal. At the 1986 Conference of Nonaligned Nations in Harare, Zimbabwe, Segal’s forty-seven-page pamphlet, AIDS—Its Nature And Origin, became a sensation among African delegates. Western news outlets took notice. Even Britain’s respectable Daily Telegraph printed an uncritical report on Segal’s research.

  Needless to say, the Fort Detrick–AIDS theory was baseless—a creation of the Soviet bloc’s aktivinyye meropriata (“active measures”) propaganda policy. As historian Thomas Boghardt argued in a 2009 Studies in Intelligence report, the original 1983 Patriot letter was almost certainly written by the KGB. As for Segal, he was a stooge of the East German Stasi, which fed the confused old man a steady stream of tantalizing documents to encourage his fantasy research.

  The Soviet bloc’s effort to pin AIDS on the Pentagon turned out to be brief—in part thanks to pressure imposed by the USSR’s own medical establishment, which by the late 1980s was eager to access American data on HIV. In 1988, just three years after the Patriot letter appeared, official Soviet efforts to promote the conspiracy theory ceased. Speaking to the government newspaper Izvestia, the president of the Soviet Academy of Sciences declared: “Not a single Soviet scientist, not a single medical or scientific institution, shares [Segal’s] position.”

  But the conspiracist cat already was out of the bag. Die-hard communists, black nationalists, and the full menagerie of Western conspiracy theorists all signed on.

  To this day, the Fort Detrick–AIDS conspiracy theory and its variants remain popular in the African American community. In a 2010 study of 214 Los Angeles–area African American men undergoing treatment for HIV, 44 percent agreed that “HIV is a manmade virus.” Thirty-five percent agreed that the disease was produced “in a government laboratory.” And 31 percent said that AIDS “is a form of genocide, or planned destruction, against blacks.” The study also found that a belief in AIDS conspiracy theories correlates negatively with adherence to prescribed antiretroviral drug regimens—suggesting that conspiracism itself, rather than any government plot, is killing black AIDS carriers.

  In South Africa, meanwhile, former president Thabo Mbeki’s obsession with AIDS denialism and crackpot theories of the disease’s origins—and his consequent reluctance to distribute lifesaving medications—are estimated to have caused more than 330,000 otherwise preventable deaths. In 2000, as the world scientific community demanded that Mbeki’s government act against the AIDS epidemic, he instead sent world leaders a paranoid letter, claiming that the pressure on Africans to adhere to “established scientific truths” comprised a “campaign of intellectual intimidation and terrorism.” His like-minded health minister discouraged her citizens from taking antiretroviral drugs, which she called “poison,” and instead promoted natural “remedies” like garlic and beetroot.

  Education, many readers might assume, is the key to eradicating conspiracism. The Fort Detrick–AIDS conspiracy theory—and Mbeki’s response to it—suggest the answer is more complicated.

  The former South African president was one of the most intellectually sophisticated members of the African National Congress elite, having earned a BA in economics and a master’s degree in African studies from the University of Sussex. Yet Mbeki’s mind also was permanently scarred by his fight against apartheid. His father, Govan Mbeki, was a communist who’d been imprisoned for terrorism and treason. One of Thabo Mbeki’s brothers died under mysterious circumstances in Lesotho. A son died trying to escape the country. Within the African National Congress, Mbkei became entangled in the group’s vicious campaign to root out informants—and narrowly escaped being tortured by his fellow insurgents. Which is to say that Mbeki’s whole early life had been one constant set of battles, tragedies, and dark plots. When a mysterious new epidemic suddenly broke out in his backyard, he saw it through this same conspiratorial lens. The notion that AIDS was spread through unprotected sex, in particular, seemed to strike Mbeki as a sort of blood libel against black people—not dissimilar to those spread by white bigots during the apartheid era. Medical schools, he complained, taught South Africans that they are “germ carriers, and human beings of a lower order that cannot subject its [sic] passions to reason . . . natural-born, promiscuous carriers of germs, unique in the world. [Scientists] proclaim that our continent is doomed to an inevitable mortal end because of our unconquerable devotion to the sin of lust.”

  Eventually, Mbeki relented, and permitted some distribution of AIDS medications in South African medical clinics. But he never fully backed off from his conspiracy theories, despite persistent appeals by the world’s scientific community. Only when he was succeeded in the presidency by Jacob Zuma—a man with a fifth-grade education—did South Africa fully embrace the scientifically prescribed panoply of AIDS treatments and prevention programs.

  As discussed later in this chapter, I believe a certain very specific kind of education can be helpful for inoculating young minds against conspiracy theories. But as Mbeki’s example illustrates, conspiracism is only a nominally intellectual exercise. As argued in Chapter 5, it originates in an overlapping tangle of emotional and psychological factors that typically elude intellectual self-awareness, and which can’t be refuted by logic and evidence: ethnic bigotry, fear of societal change and new technologies, economic uncertainty, midlife ennui, medical trauma, coming-of-age hubris, spiritual hunger, narcissism, the psychic scars left by past traumas, and outright psychosis.

  This explains why arguing down a committed conspiracy theorist is impossible. Whenever I’ve tried to debate Truthers on the facts of 9/11, for instance, all of my accumulated knowledge about the subject has proven entirely useless—because in every exchange, the conspiracy theorist inevitably would ignore the most obvious evidence and instead focus the discussion on the handful of obscure, allegedly incriminating oddities that he had memorized. No matter how many of these oddities I manage to bat away (even assuming I have the facts immediately at hand to do so), my debating opponent always has more at hand.

  In this game, the conspiracist claims victory merely by scoring a single uncontested point—since, as he imagines it, every card he plays is a trump. To quote 9/11 conspiracy theorist Richard Falk (better known as the UN official who suggested that Israel’s actions in Gaza were akin to the Nazi Holocaust): “It is not necessary to go along with every suspicious inference in order to conclude that the official account of 9/11 is thoroughly unconvincing . . . Any part of this story is enough to vindicate [the] basic contention.” The defender of rationalism, meanwhile, is stuck fighting for a stalemate.

  Nor does it hold any water with conspiracists that their theories have been rejected and discredited by mainstream researchers, journalists, and government officials. As noted in the Introduction, the defining feature of a true conspiracy theory is that it has, embedded within its syllogistic circuitry, an explanation for why insiders refuse to go public with their information: Either they are coconspirators themselves, or they have been paid off, or threatened.

  This is why so few experts are willing to take conspiracy theorists up on their frequent challenges to hold public debates. And those who do typically are sorry they did. In the 1990s, both Phil Donahue and Montel Williams made the disastrous decision to put Holocaust deniers on television. The Donahue episode, which ai
red on March 14, 1994, was a particularly bad train wreck, in which the host looked on helplessly as confused Auschwitz survivors bungled basic facts about the death camps (such as promoting the myth that prisoners were turned into soap) in the face of more authoritative-seeming deniers. One would think that someone who actually lived through the Holocaust would be able to out-debate a conspiracy theorist. But that assumption is wrong: As researchers Michael Shermer and Alex Grobman wrote in their 2000 book, Denying History: Who Says the Holocaust Never Happened And Why Do They Say It: “Most survivors know very little about the Holocaust outside of what happened to them half a century ago, and deniers are skilled at tripping them up when they get dates wrong.”

  I’ll admit to feeling personally humbled by my failure to get the best of conspiracy theorists: What was the use in going through the official 9/11 report with a highlighter and Post-it notes, much less writing a whole book on the subject of Trutherdom, if I couldn’t win an argument with a single college student? But on a more fundamental level, I also felt disillusioned by what this experience taught me about the limits of intellectual discourse itself. Even the reality of lived experience—the most direct path to truth there is—has been undermined by the conspiracist mindset, which overlooks eyewitness reports—of a plane flying into the Pentagon, or skyscrapers collapsing without any hint of internal demolition—in favour of tortured inferences from scattered esoterica.

  Conspiracy theorists typically appear self-confident and even smug when they’re discussing their area of obsession. But in many cases, it’s an act: Since their entire identity is based on a nest of riddles that will unravel if they allow themselves to step outside their narrow conspiracist mindset, their emotional state is more fragile than they let on. When assembled in groups—either virtually, on the Internet, or in a real-life lecture hall—their group dynamics therefore tend to be brittle and cultish. “I simply asked logical questions that contradicted some of the conspiracy claims and demanded answers at the Loose Change Forum, [and] I got banned for that,” reports one former quasi-Truther on a James Randi Educational Foundation discussion server. “[That] really annoyed me and I signed up again asking why they banned me for bringing up evidence against [a] fake Osama video, which got me banned again. All in all I got banned a hundred times or so.”

  During the course of writing this book, I became friendly with several conspiracy theorists—and in some cases, connected with them on Facebook. According to the earnest thinking I originally brought to this project, I imagined it would be possible for us to remain on friendly terms, even on the understanding that we disagreed on, say, the origins of 9/11 or the birthplace of Barack Obama. This usually proved impossible: Every conversation with a conspiracy theorist tends to migrate, in one way or another, to their central obsession; and my refusal to accept their revealed “truths” always strained the relationship to the breaking point. (For this same reason, I’ve learned from interviewing a few “Truther widows,” conspiracism often tends to create extraordinary rifts within marriages—unless both partners sign on to the same theory.)

  Like all cults and cult-like movements, conspiracy theorists tend to become obsessed with dissidents, factions, internal schisms, and subplots. Many Truther purists, for instance, have seized on Noam Chomsky as a sort of Trotsky figure—primarily due to his refusal to expand his longstanding indictment of U.S. foreign policy to cover the crimes of 9/11. Some Truther books now have whole chapters dedicated to the “lies” of Chomsky and his fellow “left-wing gatekeepers.” Anti-Chomskyite Truther websites and YouTube videos also have popped up, charging that the man is nothing less than “a deep cover agent for the New World Order, a master of black propaganda whose true motives become clear with a sober and honest examination.” Truther Kevin Barrett, in particular, has made vilification of Chomsky a personal obsession, engaging the famous linguist in a 15,000-word email exchange, and then posting the whole thing to the Internet (against Chomsky’s expressly stated wishes), complete with a final Barrett salvo declaring that the man has “done more to keep the 9/11 blood libel alive, and cause the murder of more than a million Muslims, than any other single person.”

  Though I would never presume to be loathed by Truthers at this epic level, my own investigations have earned me a modest taste of this treatment—sufficient to understand their radicalized us-versus-them mentality. (Google “Jonathan Kay” and “9/11” for a sampling.) The experience also has convinced me that any effort to engage committed conspiracy theorists in reasoned debate is a waste of time. Once someone has bitten down on the red pill, it’s too late. As with any incurable disease, the best course isn’t treatment, it’s prevention.

  The same is true of conspiracy movements themselves—which never entirely go away, even as the passage of years fails to vindicate their underlying theories. Even when conspiracists move on to fresh subjects, they tend to cite the truth of their old claims as validations for their new ones. Since the military-industrial complex killed JFK, why wouldn’t it have destroyed the World Trade Center? Since the Bilderbergers had Bill Clinton and George W. Bush in their pocket, why not Barack Obama as well? In this way, conspiracy theories have built up like layers of rubble that smother what once were the intellectual foundations of rationalism.

  An Ounce of Prevention

  “Nothing you will learn in the course of your studies will be of the slightest possible use to you in after life, save only this: That if you work hard and diligently you should be able to detect when a man is talking rot. And that, in my view, is the main, if not the sole purpose of education.”

  —Harold Macmillan, prime minister of Britain 1957–1963, quoting his classics tutor at Oxford

  Conspiracism is a stubborn creed because humans are pattern-seeking animals. Show us a sky full of stars, and we’ll arrange them into animals and giant spoons. Show us a world full of random misery, and we’ll use the same trick to connect the dots into secret conspiracies. For most of us, our desire to impose an artificial pattern on world events is held in check by our rational sense, which tells us that life often is cruel and unpredictable. Or we find compartmentalized, socially accepted outlets to give expression to our pattern-seeking—such as astrology or mainstream religion. Conspiracism takes root when, for the reasons discussed in this book, our pattern-seeking appetite overwhelms these containment mechanisms.

  Yet this same pattern-seeking penchant is also the key to fighting conspiracism: By teaching ourselves to recognize conspiracism’s unchanging basic structure—from its archetype in the Protocols to its modern incarnation in the 9/11 Truth movement—we can protect our brains from conspiracy theories before they have a chance to infect our thinking.

  Conspiracism is deeply rooted in American thinking. Then again, the same once was true of racism. Exactly 150 years ago, the United States went to war with itself over the principle that a man could be chained up like an animal because of the color of his skin. It wasn’t till 1954 that black and white schoolchildren were granted the constitutional right to attend the same schools. Even as recently as the 1970s, well within the living memory of middle-aged Americans, the idea that blacks and whites should be able to marry one another, or use the same swimming pools, was still controversial. And then, in the space of just a few decades, everything changed—capped by an extraordinary moment in early 2009 when it could be said that America’s most powerful politician, beloved entertainment figure, and revered athlete all were black (Barack Obama, Oprah Winfrey, and Tiger Woods).

  Women, meanwhile, went from ornamental second-class citizens in the typing pool and kitchen to full-fledged business-world equals. Perhaps most stunning of all was the transformation of our perception of gays. In 1973, homosexuality still was classified as a mental disorder by the American Psychiatric Association. Just 25 years later, NBC was airing a hit sitcom starring two gay men as part of its “must see” Thursday night lineup. Never in human history have social attitudes toward what we now (increasingly anachronistically) call �
�disadvantaged groups” been transformed so quickly. Never has human bigotry been winnowed at anywhere near this pace.

  What developments in the Western intellectual condition permitted such a massive, wholesale shift in thinking? Whole libraries of books have been written about the struggle against racism, sexism, and homophobia, and I will not try to summarize them here. Instead, I will highlight just one essential factor, whose roots are in the Enlightenment, but which reached full bloom only in the twentieth century: civilizational self-awareness.

  By this, I mean the habit of mind that permits us to stand back and objectively observe the flaws, hypocrisies, and double-standards embedded in our society. This ability is taken for granted in the modern Western world, so much so that we don’t even recognize it as a special frame of mind. But it is: Throughout human history, and in most of the non-Western world today, the superiority of one’s own tribe over others, of the faithful over the infidels, of the we over the they, has been entirely taken for granted—all corollaries of the reflexive tribalism that evolution has programmed into the hard-wiring of the human brain. Even the basic idea that a civilization should be “improved” can exist only in a society that is aware of its relationship to history and the outside world: It has little resonance in caste-ridden communities where the pace of technological change is slow, sons inherit their fathers’ jobs, social mobility is nonexistent, and the established pecking order—with all its attendant forms of discrimination—is uncritically accepted as God-given and timeless.