Among the Truthers (9 page)

In regard to its political orientation, Estulin's theory betrays an interesting political shift on display in the conspiracist literature of the last two decades: Though he rails against the CIA, the RAND Corporation, the military-industrial complex, and all the traditional bugbears of post-JFK left-wing conspiracists, Estulin is—like Alex Jones, the Texas-based radio host profiled in the previous chapter—very much a libertarian conservative. And the dystopia he sketches out looks a lot like the communist USSR of his youth (not to mention the “Super-Government Administration” detailed in the
Protocols of the Elders of Zion
, the One State of
We
, and the Oligarchy of
Caesar's Column
—but more on this similitude in the next chapter).

Far from being enemies of communism, Estulin argues, today's corporate oligarchs are its admiring successors: “The fact is that members of the Establishment operating through ‘private' organizations such as the Bilderbergers, the CFR and the Trilateral Commission understand socialism as the ultimate power system for control, and understand its psychology better than the Marxists do . . . Socialism to them . . . is not a system to redistribute wealth from the rich to the poor. Rather, it's a mechanism for gaining a greater and greater concentration of power and control.”

Estulin and Jones are not alone: Beginning in the 1980s, and accelerating throughout the 1990s, the politics of conspiracism began to become an equal opportunity affair, as fringes on both sides of the ideological spectrum increasingly began promoting the same basic type of New World Order conspiracy theories. In 1991, for instance, no less a mainstream conservative than televangelist (and former presidential aspirant) Pat Robertson published an odd book arguing that a satanic network of Illuminati, Masons, and “international bankers” is conspiring to create an Antichrist-inspired world government that will rob Americans of their freedoms, promote pedophilia—and, of course, destroy Christianity.

Lurid as all this may sound, Robertson's book tapped into the deep resurgence in right-wing populism that had vaulted Ronald Reagan to power. The sexual revolution, on-demand abortion, the Equal Rights Amendment, gay rights, forced busing, and the end of school prayer all had a traumatizing effect on American social conservatives during the 1970s and 1980s. But during these battles, the bulk of their hostility was directed overseas—at the Soviet Union, whose godless creed was blamed for secular humanism and other evils afflicting the world. When the Berlin Wall fell, and George H. W. Bush declared a “new world order” (he actually did use those words), right-wing paranoia suddenly became directed inward, at an imagined conspiracy by America's elites to roll back basic liberties—especially regarding guns, and the loosely defined constellation of powers known as “states' rights”—while surrendering the nation's sovereignty to some global overlord. On the extreme fringes, Americans began organizing armed militias to fight back against a feared “occupation” of America—a movement centered in the tristate region of eastern Washington, Montana, and the Idaho Panhandle.

Like Robertson, many of the most influential conspiracists tied their theories directly to America's tradition of apocalyptic End Times millennialism. But even among purely secular conspiracy theorists, there was clearly a casting about for some epochal, Manichean struggle to replace the comforting, good-versus-evil organizing principle of the Cold War. The result was a hodgepodge of different groups and movements, embracing creeds as diverse as Christian Identity, Aryan Pride, militant libertarianism, states' rights, anti-Semitism, crank monetary theories, and nativist xenophobia.

During this transitional period, American conspiracist culture grew very dark. Linda Milligan, an Ohio-based researcher who had first studied UFO conspiracists in the 1980s, told me she was shocked at the transformation she observed when she revisited the same people a decade later. “Aquarian-age optimism has been transformed into a dark new-age despair,” she reported in a 1994 essay. “Interest in the mind, for example, has shifted from speculation about the mind's as yet unrealized powers (ESP, for example) to absorption in the belief that evil beings, UFO aliens referred to as the Grays, are implanting mind control devices in the brains of thousands of Americans. And they are doing this, my informants believe, with the cooperation of elements of the U.S. government along with the internationalists bent on creating a one world government.”

As another UFO-conspiracist expert, Michael Barkun, notes, the words “new world order” became a sort of “unifying conspiracy theory,” drawing in a huge range of angry prophets with a narrative containing some or all of the following elements: “the systematic subversion of republican institutions by a federal government utilizing emergency powers; the gradual subordination of the United States to a world government operating through the United Nations; the creation of sinister new military and paramilitary forces . . . the permanent stationing of foreign troops on U.S. soil; the widespread use of black helicopters to transport the tyranny's operatives; the confiscation of privately owned guns; the incarceration of so-called patriots in concentration camps run by FEMA; the implantation of microchips and other advanced technology for surveillance and mind control; the replacement of Christianity with a New Age world religion; and, finally, the manipulation of the entire apparatus by a hidden hierarchy of conspirators.”

The right-wing militia movements withered in the late 1990s—largely as a result of the stepped-up investigation and prosecution that came in the wake of the Oklahoma City bombing. But the radical habits of mind the movement epitomized—extreme hatred of government, hostility toward foreign and multilateral entities, and an expectation of an apocalyptic confrontation with the forces of evil—persisted, and have been taken up by a new generation of Internet-savvy activists—Alex Jones now being the most famous and influential.

Perhaps the most extraordinary aspect of this right-wing conspiracist movement is the manner in which its fantasies came to mesh almost exactly with those propagated on the opposite, university-educated, anti-American, left-wing side of the political spectrum.

Some articles of faith divide the two camps: Radical leftists believe that the totalitarian and cryptocratic forces plotting to take over the world are oil magnates, uniformed Dr. Strangeloves, CIA spooks, and the like, while radical rightists imagine a world run by the United Nations, the European Union, the International Criminal Court, and NAFTA tribunals. But at both poles, the vision of the totalitarian hell to come is otherwise identical—as are the 9/11 conspiracy theories the two camps came to embrace.

Since I entered politics, I have chiefly had men's views confided to me privately. Some of the biggest men in the U.S., in the field of commerce and manufacturing, are afraid of somebody, are afraid of something. They know that there is a power somewhere so organized, so subtle, so watchful, so interlocked, so complete, so pervasive, that they had better not speak above their breath when they speak in condemnation of it.

—Woodrow Wilson

There exists a subterranean world where psychological fantasies disguised as ideas are churned out by crooks and half-educated fanatics for the benefit of the ignorant and the superstitious. There are times when this underworld emerges from the depths and suddenly fascinates, captures and dominates multitudes of usually sane and responsible people, who thereupon take leave of sanity and responsibility. And it occasionally happens that this underworld becomes a historical power and changes the course of history.

—Norman Cohn, preface to 1996 British edition of
Warrant for Genocide

I
n the previous chapter, I wrote about the broad political, religious, and technological trends that have shaped American conspiracism. In this chapter, I will focus on the actual mythology of the most popular conspiracy theories, especially the 9/11 Truth movement.

Nailing down this mythology proved surprisingly difficult. That's because few of the Truthers I interviewed presented any sort of coherent narrative about what they believe actually happened on 9/11. While almost all of them embraced the general idea that explosives brought down the World Trade Center, and that Dick Cheney and his CIA friends were in on it, that's generally as far as they'd go. None offered any kind of detailed theory about how such a massive plot might have been organized, financed, and executed, let alone the identity of the hundreds of demolitions experts, engineers, and spies who would be needed to staff it. “[This website] critically examines the official government explanation of the attack and concludes that many of its key assertions are impossible,” asserts one typical Truther website, 9/11 Research. “We do not pretend to know exactly how the attack was carried out or exactly who the perpetrators are.”

Following in the tradition of Bertrand Russell's famous essay about JFK, most Truthers prefer to focus on
questions
. Among the “10 reasons for starting a new 9/11 investigation” listed on the leaflets they distribute at Ground Zero, for instance, are such entries as, “What force pulverized most of the concrete and office material of the Twin Towers into dust, and was able to eject steel beams into buildings over 400 feet away?” and, “Why was there no mention in the 9/11 Commission Report of WTC Building 7?”

The result is that any author setting out to describe the Truthers' take on 9/11 has a difficult time putting together a coherent narrative. Instead, he has notebooks full of esoteric debating points about avionics, building demolition, NORAD flight-tracking procedures, and a dozen other scattered subjects. Though I will summarize some of this material in the next chapter, I don't believe it is the best way to introduce the uninitiated to the Truther worldview.

Instead, I will begin by taking a step back, and focusing on the broad undercurrents reflected in Truther literature. While the 9/11 conspiracists I met exhibited a wide range of different personalities and niche obsessions, their claims about the people who control our planet consistently fell into the same basic template—a template that governs not just the Truth movement, but almost every major systemic conspiracy theory dating back to Europe's Belle Époque.

And so that is where this chapter's investigation will begin.

A Dark Fairy Tale

In August 1897, Theodor Herzl and two hundred fellow activists convened at a concert hall in Basel, Switzerland, to attend the First Zionist Congress. The capstone of their deliberations was
The Basel Program
, a landmark manifesto aimed at “establishing for the Jewish people a publicly and legally assured home in Palestine.” The delegates also officially adopted
Hatikvah
, a song that, six decades later, would become the national anthem for the country we call Israel.

But as legend has it, it was all an elaborate act—just a respectable set-piece to divert gentile journalists and spies from the real meeting taking place at a secret location nearby. There, Herzl delivered a clandestine twenty-four-part lecture series for Jewish ears only. In these speeches, “protocols” as Herzl called them, there was little talk of carving a small country out of the Middle Eastern desert. What he proposed was nothing less than a plan for total world domination.

Europe's gentiles—or
goyim
, as they were described in Yiddish—generally were a happy, earnest lot, Herzl told his audience. They worked their farms and small businesses assiduously, prayed to a benevolent Christian God, and prospered under the kindly, lawful aristocrats who rose up from among their ranks.

But they were also gullible, lustful, greedy, and unstable in their attitudes—human frailties that the calculating, ascetic Jew could exploit in order to rob them of their entitlements.

The Jewish strategy, Herzl explained, would target all strata of
goyim
. To corrupt the proles, Jewish smut merchants would provide pornography and “alcoholic liquors.” To ensnare middle-class farmers and merchants, Jewish moneylenders would practice usury. Ambitious gentile politicians would be co-opted through extortion and outright bribery; or else installed as quislings in Europe's Masonic lodges, which Jews secretly controlled.

Meanwhile, gentile intellectuals, such as they were, would be beguiled by democracy, liberalism, Marxism, socialism, communism, Darwinism, anarchism, “Nietzsche-ism,” and all the other fangled creeds the Jew had created.

Ironically, the Jews' most powerful weapon in the campaign to enslave gentiles would be none other than the lure of sweet liberty itself: “The abstraction of freedom has enabled us to persuade the mob in all countries that . . . the steward may be replaced like a worn-out glove,” Herzl explained to the assembled Elders. “It is this possibility of replacing the representatives of the people which has placed them at our disposal, and . . . given us the power of appointment.”

Of course, God-fearing men would never willingly succumb to Jewish tyranny. But Herzl had an answer to that: Jews would not only annihilate Europe's earthly rulers, but also “the very principle of God-head and the spirit,” whose presence in men's souls shielded them from the “arithmetical calculations and material needs” upon which the Jew preyed. No longer would the peoples of the world “walk contentedly and humbly under the guiding hand of [their] spiritual pastor submitting to the dispositions of God upon earth.” Instead, “all nations will be swallowed up in the pursuit of gain, and in the race for it will not take note of their common foe [the Jew].”

As his plan played out, Herzl explained, Jews would cycle the world through an endless series of bloody wars and economic depressions, which would serve both to enrich Jewish war profiteers and speculators, and cast the rest of the globe into poverty. Traumatized to the point of total despair, the peoples of the world would have no choice but to succumb.

When Herzl was done with his twenty-four protocols, the conference disbanded, and the Jewish Elders returned to their homes in order to prepare their plots. The world might never have learned of the protocols' existence—but for a single Russian police agent who, through means unknown, intercepted one of Herzl's acolytes at a German Masonic lodge.

In exchange for what one must assume to have been an extravagant sum, the Jew agreed to turn over his handwritten transcription of Herzl's protocols—but only till the next morning. All through the night, a team of Russian scribes feverishly copied out the Hebrew text. When sunrise broke, the fruits of their labor were sent to translators in Moscow, who would go on to warn the world of the Jewish menace.

Thus ends the fairy tale, known to history as
The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion
—a document that would become the most influential conspiracist tract since the era of the French Revolution. Millions of readers were taken in by this poisonous fraud following its widespread publication in 1919. Adolf Hitler and other war criminals would be inspired to act on it, setting in motion a wave of anti-Semitic hatred so intense that, by the end of the Second World War, Central and Eastern Europe were left virtually
Judenrein
.

All this came to pass despite the fact the
Protocols
was debunked within months of its dissemination. As investigators revealed, the document was concocted by czarist anti-Semites who had not even taken the trouble to invent the lies themselves. Instead, they plagiarized
Protocols
from two sources:
Biarritz
, a lurid anti-Semitic novel published fifty years previously in Germany, and a French propaganda tract from the same era,
Dialogues in Hell between Machiavelli and Montesquieu
, written by a French lawyer named Maurice Joly. (The influence of Joly's book is particularly obvious: According to one scholar's analysis, a full 40 percent of
Protocols'
content is lifted word for word from
Dialogues
.)

The
Protocols
was a lie. But like all successful conspiracy theories, it was a lie that people wanted to hear. This was a moment when Europe had just endured not one, but two epic upheavals, neither of which had a simple, comprehensible cause. The Russian Revolution had been sparked by an artificial, untested, schismatic ideology created by an impoverished eccentric living in England. The First World War was an accidental product of Great Power paranoia, miscalculation, and jingoism—all sparked into deadly reaction by an assassination in one of Europe's most obscure backwaters (an event that is itself the subject of innumerable conspiracy theories). When it was over, the flower of European youth was dead, and two once-great empires had been destroyed. It's not hard to understand why millions of shell-shocked survivors could become convinced that the leaders who'd sent these men to their deaths had somehow been tricked by a hidden, demonic force.

For Europeans reading the
Protocols
in the 1920s and 1930s, the document offered something precious: the idea that only a
single
barrier—the Jewish race—blocked a return to the peaceful, pious, and socially ordered world that had been destroyed by war, revolution, mechanization, urbanization, radical political ideologies, secularization, and catastrophic inflation. The evil brilliance of the
Protocols
lay in the fact that it patched together a theory of Jewish conspiracy that covered every one of these upheavals—all the while enchanting the reader with backward glimpses of the noble, God-fearing milieu that the Jew allegedly had undermined.

The
Protocols
did not arise out of the ether. As Norman Cohn illustrated in his 1967 classic
Warrant for Genocide
, the period between 1850 and World War I was a golden age of apocalyptic Judeo-Masonic
⁴
propaganda. From France to Russia, all sorts of overlapping, mutually plagiarizing fraud manifestos became best sellers. Many of them even were structured like the
Protocols
, with a cackling rabbi instructing his Jewish brethren in his faith's plans for world domination. But thanks to a series of historical accidents, the
Protocols
became the document that definitively popularized the conspiracist spirit that seized Western civilization during the early decades of the twentieth century, and which has survived, in the same basic form—albeit with an ever-changing cast of villains—to the present day.

As noted in the previous chapter, ancient forms of conspiracism typically vilified one of two enemies: Jews and secret societies. The
Protocols
twisted these two venerable strands into one deadly skein: The Jews, by this hateful telling, were both a filthy religious sect seeking to exterminate Christendom
and
a secret society bent on adapting world trade, politics, media, and all the other secular pillars of civilization to their evil schemes.

Even when the Third Reich lay in ruins, and anti-Semitism became widely detested in its bald-faced Nazi-style form, the
Protocols
would remain ensconced as a sort of universal blueprint for all the successor conspiracist ideologies that would come to infect Western societies over the next nine decades—right up to the modern-day Truther and Birther fantasies of the twenty-first century. In these conspiracy theories, the imagined evildoing cabal would come by many names—communist, globalist, neocon. But in most cases, it would exhibit the same five recurring traits that the
Protocols
fastened upon the Jewish elders in the shadow of World War I: singularity, evil, incumbency, greed, and hypercompetence.

Singularity

Oliver Stone calls it the Beast—a single overarching power that controls history and punishes those who swim against its currents. “What I see from 1963, with Kennedy's murder at high noon in Dallas, to 1974, with Nixon's removal, is a pattern,” the filmmaker told an interviewer in 1996. “Call me wrong, but we have John Kennedy suspiciously killed, we have Robert Kennedy suspiciously killed, we have Martin Luther King suspiciously killed, and we have Nixon suspiciously ‘falling on his sword.' These four men came from different political perspectives, but they were pushing the envelope, trying to lead America to new levels. We posit that, in some way, they pissed off what we call ‘the Beast,' the Beast being a force, or forces, greater than the presidency . . . Between 1963 and 1974, these four men all ran up against the Beast and were removed or killed as a consequence.”