Among the Truthers (27 page)

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 to 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.

I
n 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.

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.

The prototypical JFK conspiracist was Harold Weisberg, a lifelong Warren Commission critic who wrote eight books, and accumulated sixty filing cabinets full of JFK documents (many procured through his own laborious Freedom of Information Act requests) at his Frederick, Maryland, farmhouse over the course of thirty-five years. By contrast Weisberg's 9/11-era equivalent—mega-Truther David Ray Griffin—wrote even more books in the space of just five years, all of them based in large part on material he found while surfing the Internet.

This dumbing-down effect explains the downward shift in the age profile of conspiracists: While influential JFK conspiracy theorists tended to be bookish middle-aged eccentrics, many of the Internet's noisiest Truthers are barely old enough to shave: Conspiracism is something they fit in between video gaming and Facebook.

Muckraking 2.0

The birth of the Internet was not the first time a media revolution had remade the world of conspiracism. In 1906, U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt delivered a speech denouncing a new kind of journalist—“the man with the Muck-rake, the man who could look no way but downward with the muck-rake in his hands; who was offered a celestial crown for his muck-rake, but who would neither look up nor regard the crown he was offered, but continued to rake to himself the filth of the floor.”

Roosevelt was thought to be singling out the yellow journalism produced by William Randolph Hearst's media empire. But Hearst wasn't the only offender: By the early twentieth century, “muckraking” was a well-established practice everywhere across the American journalistic landscape.

The negative connotation associated with the term is undeserved: The muckrakers' mission—to expose corruption in business and government, and document the wretchedness of society's have-nots—aroused popular support for the reforms ushered in by the Progressive Era, and set the stage for the modern forms of investigative and human-interest journalism we know today.

Early muckraking investigations detailed payoffs at city hall, inhumane working conditions in factories and mines, and the predatory practices of great industrialists. The common theme throughout was power and its abuses. As legendary twentieth-century journalist Robert Cantwell put it, the muckrakers “traced the intricate relationship of the police, the underworld, the local political bosses, the secret connections between the new corporations . . . and the legislatures and the courts. In doing this, they drew a new cast of characters for the drama of American society: bosses, professional politicians, reformers, racketeers, captains of industry.”

Readers of this new brand of journalism came to view their country as a dark, dog-eat-dog place, full of secret conspiracies. “Reality now was rough and sordid,” Richard Hofstadter wrote in
The Age of Reform
. “It was hidden, neglected, and off-stage. It was conceived essentially as that stream of external and material events which was most likely to be unpleasant. Reality was the bribe, the rebate, the bought franchise, the sale of adulterated food. It was what one found in [Upton Sinclair's]
The Jungle
, [Frank Norris']
The Octopus
, [Henry Demarest Lloyd's]
Wealth Against Commonwealth
, or [Lincoln Steffens']
The Shame of the Cities
. . . Reality was a series of unspeakable plots.”

As we've seen, populist fearmongering against big government and greedy corporations was a dominant political theme in the United States long before the rise of the muckrakers. But the new forms of journalism, coupled with a trend toward realism in literature, invigorated populism by providing a vivid human element. Till the early twentieth century, America's bogeymen generally were ill defined in the public imagination. In many cases, they were simply crude caricatures—fat men in top hats who appeared in editorial cartoons and satirical pamphlets. Beginning with the rise of the muckrakers, newspapers, radio stations, and eventually television would show Americans the true face of America's power structure. To quote Hofstadter again, this time writing in
The Paranoid Style in American Politics
(1964): “The villains of the modern Right are much more vivid than those of their paranoid predecessors . . . For the vaguely delineated villains of the anti-Masons, for the obscure and disguised Jesuit agents, the little-known papal delegates of the anti-Catholics, for the shadowy international bankers of the monetary conspiracies, we may now substitute eminent public figures like Presidents Roosevelt, Truman, and Eisenhower, Secretaries of State like Marshall, Acheson, and Dulles, Justices of the Supreme Court like Frankfurter and Warren, and the whole battery of lesser but still famous and vivid alleged conspirators headed by Alger Hiss.”

Even in the 1950s, Hofstadter seemed to understand the threat to rationalism posed by the mass media. Indeed, much of what he wrote in his era directly foreshadowed the overall shrillness and paranoia that would come to infuse cable television and the Internet—technologies that wouldn't arrive in American homes till after his death in 1970. “The growth of the mass media of communication and their use in politics have brought politics closer to the people than ever before and have made politics a form of entertainment . . . an arena into which private emotions and personal problems can be readily projected. Mass communications have made it possible to keep the mass man in an almost constant state of mobilization”: These are words that could have been written about the media climate surrounding the 2010 midterm elections. Yet they were published by Hofstadter (in his essay “The Pseudo-Conservative Revolt”) during Dwight D. Eisenhower's first term.

D
uring my law school years in the mid–1990s, I spent a lot of time on east coast highways, driving back and forth between the Yale campus in New Haven, Connecticut, my family home in Montreal, and my various summer jobs at law firms in Washington, D.C., New York City, and Pittsburgh. During my late-night drives, I would flip through the AM dial trying to keep myself entertained.

My favorite station was WFAN, a popular all-sports outfit broadcasting throughout the northeastern states from its studios in Astoria, New York. The Fan, as it's widely known, covers all major American sports. But the overwhelming focus is on the Giants, Jets, Yankees, Mets, Knicks, and Rangers—with a significant dose of Islanders, Nets, Devils, and college sports when circumstances warrant. Listening to the Fan was like hanging out with a bipolar friend: When a New York team won, the mood of WFAN's callers was euphoric. If they lost, the callers' collective mood ranged from depressed to apoplectic.

Coming from Montreal, where hockey is a secular religion, I was used to obsessive sports-fan culture. But the New York City variant has a different tone. For the regulars who called in to WFAN, a loss could never be chalked up to something so banal as the other team just playing better. There was always a scapegoat—the coach, the ref, league officials, an underperforming deadbeat star. The loathing heaped on these figures was like something out of a Stalin-era communist shaming ritual. While rooting for the home team is seen as an all-American activity, there was something unhinged about these radio rants. Looking beyond the slick burbling of the hosts, and the canned studio effects, I sensed a sort of seething, tribalized fury at the unjustness of a world in which Patrick Ewing was incapable of bringing the Knicks an NBA championship.

As I surfed the dial, I found that the motifs of resentment and outrage were constant and inescapable. Dr. Laura Schlessinger—who seemed always to be on the air back in the mid–1990s, no matter what time of day it was—held forth dogmatically about the evils of sexual promiscuity, the gay lobby, permissive parents, and doormat girlfriends. The Evangelical stations offered the “Good News” of Jesus' message, but in the same breath denounced the depravity of modern America, and urged godly listeners to prepare for a coming apocalyptic confrontation with the forces of the Antichrist. In the wee hours, one could hear whole shows given over to secular conspiracy theories—UFOs, bizarre medical experiments, flying cars.