Among the Truthers (26 page)

Wrapped up in their Manichean narratives is the implicit notion that ordinary citizens must choose sides in the coming conflict—and that, when the Day of Judgment comes tomorrow—our fates will be dictated by the choices we make today. By publicly embracing a dissident ideology such as 9/11 Truth, the conspiracist isn't just making his views known about a particular issue. On a deeper spiritual level, he is marking himself as a righteous one who stands apart from the rottenness around him. The “9/11 Truth” T-shirts, banners, and bumper stickers sold at Truther events serve as modern versions of the dab of lamb's blood that Jews put on their doorposts to ward off the Angel of Death coming to slay the Egyptians' firstborn.

Like religious converts who suddenly see the light of Christ, a surprisingly large number of Truthers told me that they “just knew” that 9/11 was an inside job the second they saw the towers collapse—even though they admit that they couldn't initially identify any outward signs of foul play. In many cases, Truthers even have unwittingly co-opted the language of proselytization and born-again religious conversion. In his biographical blurb, for instance, San Francisco–area 9/11 Truth leader Ken Jenkins declares that he “completed his awakening to 9/11 truth by Nov. 2001.” His email signature file contains the vaguely Messianic line (adapted from an unrelated 2008 speech delivered by Barack Obama) “We are the ones we have been waiting for. 9/11 Truth is the cause we have been waiting for.”

Given conspiracism's common psychological role as a form of
ersatz
religiosity, it's no coincidence that several of the late twentieth century's most commercially successful conspiracy theorists grafted a rejection of mainstream Christianity right into their plots. The resulting tracts—from which Dan Brown's
Da Vinci Code
took its multimillion-dollar inspiration—provide all the usual
Protocols-
inspired narratives about creepy men in smoke-filled rooms, plus a second tantalizing treat: the promise of receiving Jesus' true,
hidden
message once those patriarchs are defeated.

Of the many pseudohistorical books that have followed this formula over the years, the most influential has been
Holy Blood
,
Holy Grail
, by Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh, and Henry Lincoln. It became a sensation not once, but twice—the first time on its publication in 1982, and then again two decades later, around the time that the authors sued Brown for allegedly plagiarizing their theory.

According to the authors' ambitious re-creation of history, Jesus Christ's bloodline did not end on the cross. Instead, it traveled to France with his wife, Mary Magdalene, and eventually combined with Frankish royalty to produce the Merovingian dynasty. The authors also describe the existence of an ultraelite, ultrapowerful, ultrasecret society—the Priory of Sion—which will soon spring the truth of Jesus' surviving bloodline on the world, thereby leading to a sort of divine Merovingian restoration that brings much of Europe into a “pan-European confederation assembled into a modern empire and ruled by a dynasty descended from Jesus.”

Yet these rulers will be no medieval-style theocrats. The true Christian faith—as
Da Vinci Code
readers know—supposedly is nothing like the patriarchal, artificial faith encoded in the New Testament by the grandees of the fourth century church. Instead, it is a humane, feminized creed, vaguely infused with the teachings of Mrs. Christ and the ancient, gentle doctrines of the pagan Mother Goddesses.

As
Holy Blood
,
Holy Grail
weaves its way from the Languedoc, to Solomon's Temple, to Paris and the other centers of European power, it sucks up every stray bit of conspiracist esoterica imaginable—from the Knights Templar (the collective Zelig of old-school conspiracy theorists) and the Holy Grail, to “the mysterious Rosicrucians” to
The
Protocols
of the Elders of Zion
, all larded up with Sunday-morning anagrams, testimonials from mail-in conspiracists befriended by the authors, and the writers' own library-stall melodramas.

Like every popular conspiracy theory, this one has a greedy, murderous archvillain that will stop at nothing to protect its illegitimate power. (It's the Vatican, of course.) The book also comes with a lost utopia, the one that might already have come to pass if the truth of Jesus' Merovingian bloodline had not been suppressed at the time the Crusaders took Jerusalem in 1099: “Once installed on the throne of the kingdom of Jerusalem . . . the [Merovingian] king of Jerusalem would then have taken precedence over all monarchs of Europe, and the patriarch of Jerusalem would have supplanted the Pope. Displacing Rome, Jerusalem would then have become the true capital of Christendom, and perhaps of much more than Christendom. For if Jesus were acknowledged as a mortal prophet, as a priest-king and legitimate ruler of the line of David, he might well have become acceptable to both Muslims and Jews. As king of Jerusalem, his lineal descendant would then have been in a position to implement one of the primary tenets of Templar policy—the reconciliation of Christianity with Judaism and Islam.” (It turns out the Priory of Sion had another chance to restore the Merovingian dynasty seven centuries later, the authors argue. But their hopes were dashed by—you guessed it—the French Revolution.
Plus ça change
.)

This provides a context for those who wonder how
The Da Vinci Code
could become such a blockbuster despite its far-fetched plot and wooden prose: By putting cloak-and-dagger plots and dissident religiosity between the same two covers, Dan Brown—like the authors on whom he relied—hit upon the (with apologies) Holy Grail of conspiracism. From a Christian reader's perspective, the most alluring part is that finding an earthly utopia doesn't even require switching religions or joining an ashram.

Lives of the Prophets

Conspiracy-theory expert Chip Berlet calls them “Gnostic heroes”: prophets who have dedicated their lives to spreading their secret knowledge in an effort to save the world from a coming apocalypse. Ken Jenkins is an archetypal Gnostic hero. So is Richard Gage, Michael Ruppert, Ignatius Donnelly and many of the other figures described in this book.

Even rank-and-file conspiracists see their belief system as something that elevates them from the mass of humanity that has not yet “awoken” to the Truth. Dan Tyler, a sixty-year-old Truther from Nashville, Tennessee, told me, “I don't know why it is that some of us can ‘see' where others are blind, that some of us will question while others demur, that some of us will persevere despite the ridicule and damage we suffer for our unorthodox opinions. I don't know why it is, but I think the answer is important, for it goes to the very nature of truth. Is truth merely a consensus? Or is truth something else, something holy and sacred?”

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.)