Among the Truthers (4 page)

Two years later, Timothy McVeigh bombed the Alfred P. Murrah building in Oklahoma City, an act intended to incite a popular revolt against the U.S. government. But Jones concluded the bombing actually was a part of a conspiracy, hatched by the feds themselves, to quash the nascent states'-rights movement. By this time, his opinion mattered: The twenty-one-year-old Jones already had his own cable-access television program. A year later, he began airing on radio. By the time George W. Bush was in his second term he arguably had become the most popular and influential conspiracist in America. His syndicated
Alex Jones Show
appears on dozens of AM, FM, and shortwave stations across the United States—a platform that gives him unparalleled influence within the Truther movement.

Jones believes that the 9/11 plot was an inside job, likely executed by using remote control technology to override the pilots of the commandeered aircraft. Under this theory, the nineteen hijackers were stooges who believed they were participating in a legitimate military exercise—though many of Jones' followers believe the men are still alive, and have developed a rich literature detailing their sightings.

When you ask Jones about all of this, one of the first things he'll tell you is that he “predicted” 9/11. What actually happened was this: On July 25, 2001, Jones warned viewers of his
Infowars
TV show that the U.S. government was planning a terrorist attack against its own citizens—flashing the White House's phone number so that people could call in and beg the president not to go through with the dastardly plot. In the broadcast, which now circulates widely on the Internet, Jones does not identify the World Trade Center as a future target, but he does declare—in typically Jonesian language—that “the United States is a shining jewel the globalists want to bring down and they will use terrorism as the pretext to get it done,” and that Osama bin Laden is “the bogeyman [the government] need[s] in this Orwellian system.”

Talking to Jones is exhausting. He spits out every sentence as if he were calling the police to report a crime in progress—footnoting each eyebrow-raising claim with scattered (but oddly precise) references to Internet news sources. As
Radar
magazine writer Jebediah Reed put it, he speaks “in a gravelly baritone fit for the public address announcer at a monster truck rally—a voice so gruff it almost sounds like he's faking it.”

He throws around acronyms like “PNAC” (Project for the New American Century, a Truther obsession described in more detail later in this book), and talks casually of NATO's role in engineering “the 888 attacks” (his term for the brief 2008 war between Russia and Georgia). Jones has lived and breathed these sorts of conspiracy theories for years. It's not clear that this New World Order prophet could turn his obsession off—though he claims he'd like to . . . if only the world would let him. “Once you discover reality, what is being admitted, all the crimes, and you go around to the zombie-like media and tell people to read all this stuff, and they just giggle and say none of this exists, that government is good, it's upsetting, and so you try to wake people up,” he tells me, slowing down the pace of his manic verbiage only slightly as he adopts the weary tone of a political martyr. “People laughed at us, and now it's all coming true. Even though I'm sick of doing this, I do it anyway. Somebody's got to do this.”

One would have thought that the Republicans' across-the-board losses in the 2008 elections would have provided Jones with peace of mind: Surely, one of the first things that Barack Obama and incoming administration officials would do is unearth the murderous 9/11 lies of their ousted opponents.

But Jones—like other Truthers—scoffs at the illusion that Obama will ever willingly permit Americans to get at the truth (“smoking Demo-crack” many activists call it). When it comes to who calls the real shots in Washington, he tells me, there is no difference between Republicans and Democrats: “They answer to the same people. The president is nothing more than a pitch man—a Madison Avenue front.” Like all committed conspiracy theorists, he is able to incorporate any new piece of information or historical development into a preexisting framework.

All governments, Jones believes, use terrorism and staged acts of warfare to hoodwink their citizens and gain support for their agendas—from the sinking of the
Maine
, to the Reichstag fire (Jones' favorite historical reference), to Pearl Harbor (“
The Honolulu Advertiser
newspaper was telling readers the attack was coming seven days before it happened”). In the case of Obama, Jones sees dark hints of things to come in the mused-about carbon tax, the proceeds from which, he believes, will one day be paid to a global overlord. The same goes for Washington's bank bailout: In a full-length film he's produced—
The Obama Deception—
Jones alleges “international bankers purposefully engineered the worldwide financial meltdown to bankrupt the nations of the planet and bring in World Government.

“Bottom line, the future as I see it is this: 70 percent
Brave New World
, 30 percent
Nineteen-Eighty-Four
,” he tells me. “There'll be lots of video games, drugs, Soma, Prozac, parties—but if you get out of line, the SWAT team's coming.”

Some Caveats

This is a book about American conspiracism's history and mythology (Chapters 1 through 4), psychological and religious roots (Chapters 5 and 6), propagation through modern media, academic and activist networks (Chapters 7, 8, and 9), and, more generally, the manner in which it erodes our society's collective grasp on reality. In Chapter 10, I offer suggestions for countering the spread of conspiracy theories—including a brief description of a hypothetical academic course that would give college students the tools needed to identify and debunk conspiracist ideologies.

Before proceeding further, let me offer five caveats about the way the material is presented.

First, this book focuses primarily on conspiracism in the United States and the Internet-based conspiracist culture that has grown out of it, with some coverage of prominent Canadian theorists who have taken an active role in promoting American conspiracist narratives. (True to its moderate stereotype, my native Canada has virtually no indigenous conspiracist culture of its own, except in regard to phobias of U.S. hegemony. And so its paranoiacs tend to co-opt American obsessions with JFK, 9/11, the USS
Liberty
, and the like.)

The 9/11 Truth movement is widespread beyond North America's shores—particularly in the Muslim countries of the Middle East and South Asia. But in these parts of the world, such theories are wrapped up in complicated ways with anti-Americanism, colonialism, and the long history of the West's interaction with what was once called the Third World—issues that lie beyond the scope of this book.

Second, this book is not intended as a rebuttal to conspiracists. Nor will I provide a complete recitation of their elaborate proofs. Those seeking a point-by-point rebuttal to the claims of the 9/11 Truth movement already have several fine resources at their disposal. In particular, I recommend the 2006 book
Debunking 9/11 Myths
:
Why Conspiracy Theories Can't Stand up to the Facts
, authored by the editors of
Popular Mechanics
magazine; Mark Roberts'
Links for 9/11 Research
; the websites 911 Myths, Debunking 911, and the blog
Screw Loose
Change
. Readers who wish to devote more time to the issue might also consider reading the
Final Report of the 9–11 Commission
, released in 2004; Lawrence Wright's Pulitzer Prize–winning 2006 account of the history of 9/11,
The Looming Tower
; and, for those who share my interest in technical material, the National Institute of Standards and Technology's exhaustive
Final Reports of the Federal Building and Fire Investigation of the World Trade Center Disaster
(a twenty-million-dollar effort that took three years to produce, and drew on the efforts of three hundred staff and external experts). I also recommend a brief, but highly illuminating 2006 paper by explosives and demolitions expert Brent Blanchard entitled
A Critical Analysis of the Collapse of WTC Towers 1
,
2&7 From a Conventional Explosives and Demolitions Industry Viewpoint
. It can be found on the website of the
Journal of Debunking 9/11
, which contains a number of other interesting articles aimed at helping laypeople refute Truther claims.

Third, a note about terminology: Throughout this book, I employ the terms “conspiracy theory” (and, interchangeably, “conspiracism”) to describe 9/11 Truth and similar movements. The phrase is defined by
Merriam-Webster's
as “a theory that explains an event or set of circumstances as the result of a secret plot.” But that formulation is broad enough to encompass
actual
historical conspiracies, such as the plot to frame Alfred Dreyfus in the 1890s, the 1972 plot by members of the Committee to Re-elect the President to spy on the Democratic National Committee headquarters, and the actual al-Qaeda plot that led to 9/11. So instead, I adopt the narrower definition set out by Oxford University conspiracy theory scholar Steve Clarke and Brian Keeley of Pitzer College (formerly of Washington University): A theory that traces important events to a secretive, nefarious cabal,
and whose proponents consistently respond to contrary facts not by modifying their theory
,
but instead by insisting on the existence of ever-wider circles of high-level conspirators controlling most or all parts of society
.

Fourth, a caveat about the different types of conspiracy theories discussed in this book: As political scientist Michael Barkun has noted, conspiracy theories usually can be classified as either “event” or “systemic.” In the former case, the conspiracist is merely seeking to explain a discrete event—such as, say, the moon landing, or a hypothetical Elizabethan plot to pass off Francis Bacon's plays as William Shakespeare's. In the case of systemic conspiracy theories, on the other hand, the theory purports to explain the operation of whole societies, and often the entire planet. This book deals primarily (though not exclusively) with systemic conspiracy theories, such as 9/11 Truth, since they are far more damaging to the marketplace of ideas. That said, I do not take pains in the text to assign conspiracy theories to one category or the other.

Fifth, a note about the people who are the subject of the case study at the heart of this book.

Many Americans view 9/11 Truthers as inherently contemptible.
Washington Post
columnist Charles Krauthammer, for instance, has declared that Truthers “derangedly desecrate” the victims of 9/11. While I understand why people hold that view, most Truthers I've met actually tend to be outwardly respectful of the innocent victims who perished in the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks. In fact, many of the most prominent boosters of the Truther movement—including some of the so-called Jersey Girls—have themselves been 9/11 widows or first responders (a psychological phenomenon I describe in the “damaged survivor” subsection of Chapter 5). At Truther events I've attended in the New York City area, organizers have raised thousands of dollars for police and firefighters who became sick or injured on 9/11, and sometimes (though not always) there is plenty of genuine American patriotism on display.

Moreover, let it be said that not all conspiracy theories are equally malign.

Some of the conspiracist movements I discuss in this book—such as the Ku Klux Klan,
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion
, and Holocaust revisionism—are explicitly racist or anti-Semitic. By including these historical references, I am
not
suggesting that Truthers harbor any equivalent hatred. Most Truthers actually cast themselves as
enemies
of bigotry whose mission is to expose the truth about a racist, white, imperialist war machine originally set into motion by the Christian crusader George W. Bush.

It also bears mentioning that the Truth movement is entirely nonviolent. Their meetings and literature typically are suffused with exhortations to tolerance and respect. When they demonstrate publicly, they get permits, and usually follow police instructions carefully. (I know this from eyewitness observations: I've marched with them several times, and have never seen anyone arrested.) Unlike hate-fueled conspiracist movements that fired adherents up by calling for pogroms against Jews or blacks (or even full-blown insurgency against the government), Truthers appeal to due process and the American Constitution. Their professed goal is to put America's leadership on trial according to the existing laws of the land.

The threat currently posed by modern conspiracists is not physical, but cultural. Like other groups that have effectively opted out of America's ideological mainstream, they threaten to turn the country into a sort of intellectual Yugoslavia—a patchwork of agitated cults screaming at one another in mutually unintelligible tongues. It's a trend that every thinking person has a duty to fight.

I worked for them . . . I took a position with a group of multinationals we call “The Company.” They call every shot this country takes. What laws to pass. What judges to appoint. What wars to fight. The thing is—if you want to rise in the ranks like I did, you had to commit to leaving everything you knew behind. Because then you start to get access to the real information . . . information that people would do a lot of things to get their hands on—like harm your family.

—
Prison Break,
Season 1, Episode 19, “The Key”

I know I'm hardly the first one to decide I have had all I can stand. It has always been a myth that people have stopped dying for their freedom in this country, and it isn't limited to the blacks, and poor immigrants. I know there have been countless before me and there are sure to be as many after. But I also know that by not adding my body to the count, I insure nothing will change. I choose to not keep looking over my shoulder at “big brother” while he strips my carcass, I choose not to ignore what is going on all around me, I choose not to pretend that business as usual won't continue; I have just had enough.

—Suicide manifesto left by Joseph Stack, who crashed a single-engine plane into an Austin, Texas, building housing IRS offices on February 18, 2010

Programmed for Conspiracy

In the late 1990s, University of Michigan developmental psychologist Margaret Evans became interested in the question of why many Americans doubted the notion of biological evolution. So she began interviewing children of different ages and religious backgrounds about where they thought animals originated.

The responses she got, analyzed in a 2000 academic journal article, revealed an interesting pattern. The youngest subjects, aged four to seven, gave a range of answers—most along the lines of “from someplace else” or “out of the ground.” But among eight-to-ten year olds, the responses were different: “Whatever their family background, most children in this age range endorse the idea that the first kinds of animals were ‘made by someone,' and often that someone is God.” Only in later years, as children developed the ability for complex, abstract thought, were they able to process the idea of evolutionary change.

Obviously, this reflects the fact that evolution is a complicated scientific concept. But Evans and other researchers believe there is more to it than that: From a young age, human brains seem programmed to see design and intention behind the world around them.

When asked about lions, children tell social science researchers that they exist so we can see them in the zoo. When asked why some rocks are pointy, children will respond: “so that animals won't sit on them.” No less a thinker than Aristotle theorized that rocks fell downward so that they could take their natural place in the world. Only in the centuries since the Enlightenment has this outlook been systematically challenged. And even now, it continues to have its defenders—the campaign for “Intelligent Design” as an alternative to random genetic mutation and natural selection being the most prominent example.

Michael Shermer, the editor of
Skeptic
magazine, and executive director of the Skeptics Society, calls this mode of thinking “agenticity”—“the tendency to believe that the world is controlled by intentional agents, usually invisible, from the top down . . . souls, spirits, ghosts, gods, demons, angels, aliens, intelligent designers, and government conspiracies are all believed to haunt our world and control our lives . . . It even informs our [modern] belief in government.”

How does this thinking evolve? The same way our bodies did.

“Picture yourself in the Neolithic environment of our evolutionary adaptation, and you're a hominid walking along and you hear a rustle in the grass,” says Shermer. “Is it a dangerous predator or just the wind? Well, if you believed it was a predator, but it was just the wind, you've made a [false positive] error. But no problem—no big deal. On the other hand, if you believe the rustle in the grass was just the wind, and it's actually a dangerous predator, you're lunch. And so there's a high cost to making a [false negative] error. [Thus,] our default position is just to assume that all patterns are real. This is the evolution of ‘patternicity' or superstition. There's been a natural selection in our cognitive processes of assuming that all patterns are real important phenomena. And we're the descendants of the most successful patternicity primates.”

At the societal level, the “agenticity” and “patternicity” Shermer describes have shaped the foundational myths that humans develop to infuse meaning into life: We take comfort from the idea that the randomness of human life, with all the attendant sorrows and catastrophes, is actually part of some master plan created by a (usually) unseen higher power. In the Western literary tradition, the prototype was Odysseus, a long-suffering pawn in a feud between the protective Athena and the malicious Poseidon. Aeneas was buffeted by similar divine intrigues on his way to founding Rome. Indeed, the whole arc of Greco-Roman mythology, and even the Bible stories that replaced it, is premised on the idea that human events are guided by mysterious supernatural agents—conspiracy theories in robes and sandals.

In many cases, this conspiracist reflex has blended with tribalism, the human instinct that causes us to rally around our own kin groups, and demonize outsiders—especially during times of conflict or crisis. The most venerable example is the blood libel against Jews that periodically gained a following in medieval European societies (and still pops up in Muslim countries), according to which Jews were accused of killing gentile children and using their blood for the production of their Passover matzos. Such anti-Semitic conspiracy theories have been around in recognizable form since at least the time of the Crusades, when bellicosity toward Muslims morphed into a more general form of religious xenophobia.

The Crusades also led to a second and distinct form of conspiracism—one directed toward the Knights Templar and similarly secretive groups of monk-warriors. While these holy legions originally were organized to fight in the Middle East, they eventually set up banks and commercial networks, and exerted a sometimes malign influence on domestic affairs. As Daniel Pipes wrote in his 1997 book
Conspiracy
:
How The Paranoid Style Flourishes And Where It Comes From
, the Knights Templar “had a conspiratorial air about them . . . At the initiation ceremony, a candidate was told that ‘of our order you only see the surface which is the outside,' implying that something very secret took place behind closed doors. At the end of the initiation, each knight kissed the adept on the mouth, an act with obvious homosexual overtones . . . Together, the spectacular rise, great power, and grisly end of the Templars [at the hands of King Philip IV of France] turned them into a permanent feature of European conspiracy theories.”

By modern standards, these theories were simple narratives—folk tales for peasants—that purported to describe finite, localized plots against this or that monarch or town. But this began to change in the eighteenth century, as capitalism, industrialization, and urbanization transformed Europe. The French Revolution, in particular, demonstrated that a relatively small group of ideologically motivated radicals, armed with a universalist creed, could propel a state, and possibly even a whole continent, into mass upheaval. “If French fears from 1725 of a ‘famine plot' to starve the country symbolize conspiracy theories before the French Revolution—a limited scheme aimed at monetary gain—fears after 1789 are captured by a supposed . . . plot to eliminate the monarchy, the church, and private property,” wrote Pipes. “Just as the conspirators grew far more alarming, so did their goals—and the theories about them.”

It is no coincidence that conspiracism took its modern form at the same time Edmund Burke was writing
Reflections on the Revolution in France
, which many historians identify as the original manifesto of conservative thought. Like the conspiracist creeds of the era, Burke's influential ideology was rooted in a nostalgia—or at least a respect—for the old order, and a (justified) fear that the revolutionary, abstract doctrines animating Europe would lead to tyranny and chaos.

The Freemasons and Jews figured prominently in conspiracy theories about the French Revolution that emerged in the early nineteenth century. But there was a new villain, as well—the Order of the Illuminati, a secret society founded on the precepts of humanitarian rationalism by an eccentric Bavarian law professor in 1776. Unlike the benign Masons, the Illuminati operated as a genuine cult, imposing secret rites on members, and forbidding interaction with outside society. Though the group would fizzle within a decade, and had only a few thousand members at its height, it remains an enduring fixation among conspiracists—including novelist Dan Brown, who put a lurid pseudo-Illuminati plot to destroy Vatican City at the center of his 2000 book,
Angels & Demons
.

Even before the French Revolution, the Marquis de Luchet warned Europe that the Illuminati aimed to “govern the world.” Later on, in 1797, Scottish conspiracist John Robison wrote that the Illuminati had been formed “for the express purpose of rooting out all the religious establishments, and overturning all the existing governments of Europe.” A year later, Augustin Barruel gave the Illuminati a starring role in his four-volume work
Memoirs Illustrating the History of Jacobinism
—in which he argued that the French Revolution resulted from a “triple conspiracy” of Freemasons, Illuminati, and anti-Christians who aimed at achieving the “overthrow of the altar, the ruin of the throne, and the dissolution of all civil society.” His list of conspirators included many of the greatest minds of the Enlightenment, including Voltaire, whom Barruel imagines to be the French Revolution's true architect.

Foreshadowing the New World Order paranoia of the John Birch Society and other twentieth-century conspiracist groups, Barruel warned of a godless world republic that would be built on the ashes of the Vatican and the world's royal palaces. Within a few years, these dark rhapsodies were co-opted wholesale by anti-Semites (who simply replaced “Illuminati” with “Jews” in their propaganda), and would become the dominant theme of the anti-Semitic literature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—including
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion
, whose enormous influence on modern conspiracism will be discussed in detail in Chapter 2.

During the twentieth century, conspiracism became the animating creed at both extremes of Europe's political spectrum.

On the Far Right, fascists idealized the notion of a single-party state, infused with a single collective cultural identity, and launched murderous propaganda campaigns against any group that stood accused of thwarting this monolithic agenda. Adolf Hitler took this view to its defining extreme, basing his entire political philosophy on a delusional fear that Jews were conspiring to destroy not only the Aryan nation, but all of humanity. “Should the Jew, with the aid of his Marxist creed, triumph over the people of this world, his Crown will be the funeral wreath of mankind, and this planet will once again follow its orbit through ether, without any human life on its surface, as it did millions of years ago,” he wrote in
Mein Kampf
. “And so I believe today that my conduct is in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator. In standing guard against the Jew I am defending the handiwork of the Lord.”

But conspiracism put down strong roots on the Far Left, too—fed both by Soviet propaganda about the United States, and the inherent nature of radical left-wing ideology, which presents capitalists as scheming parasites seeking to rob the proletariat of the value of their labor. Or as Marx himself put it in
Das Kapital
: “Within the capitalist system, all methods for raising the social productivity of labour are put into effect at the cost of the individual worker; all means for the development of production undergo a dialectical inversion so that they become means of domination and exploitation of the producers; they distort the worker into a fragment of a man.” (This aspect of Marxism helps explain why former Marxist radicals so easily leap to other militant creeds, such as fascism, Islamism, or—as with WorldNetDaily editor Joseph Farah, profiled later in this book—ultrapopulist conservatism. Notwithstanding the numbing jargon about Hegelian dialectics and such, the real lure of Marxism for these ideologues is its fundamentally conspiracist vision of society.)

In the United States, where neither Marxism nor fascism ever became truly mass movements, conspiracism followed a different and more complicated pattern—one rooted in three intertwined influences.

First was America's religious tradition of apocalyptic millenarianism—a subject discussed in more detail in Chapter 4, in the specific context of Christian conservative conspiracy theories involving Barack Obama. It is a tradition that dates back to New England's witch hunts and the “Beast-watching” early Puritans, who linked the seven-headed beast of Revelation 13 with the Catholic Church and, later on, the British Empire. Many American conspiracists hitched their appeal to this Revelation-inspired vision of End Times, assigning the various roles of False Prophet, Antichrist, and Satan to popery, the Elders of Zion, the USSR, Nazi Germany, secular humanism, a “New World Order,” or neoconservatism. The United Nations, which the rest of the civilized world tends to regard as a largely benign (if incompetent) organization, is an especially popular target: In the best-selling
Left Behind
series of novels, which portray earth in the agonies of the Rapture, the Antichrist figure takes the form of UN Secretary General “Nicolae Carpathia” (so-named, social critic Charles Pierce has quipped, “because the authors didn't think of calling him ‘Evil J. Transylvania' ”). According to this vision, the political battle for America is in fact a battle for the cosmos itself—with the conspiracists assigning to themselves the role of enlightened Prophets.