15 CONSPIRACISM REBOUNDS

TRUTHERS, BIRTHERS, AND THE NEW MILITIAS

These aren’t conspiracy theories. These are facts.

Conspiracism is about a hundred years old. The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion began to be circulated outside Russia during the Bolshevik Revolution, and very shortly thereafter Nesta Webster published her first conspiratorial books. Over the decades, conspiracism evolved and branched out into different versions, from the secret government/hidden hand to mind-controlling psychopolitics to shape-shifting human-reptilian hybrids posing as our political leaders. During the last few years, conspiracism has become so imbedded in the popular mind that the once-menacing Illuminati has become a punchline. Websites filled with photographs of celebrities making triangular hand gestures or of crackpots with photoshopped tinfoil hats define the weird end of conspiracy theory for most people. The more serious side of conspiracism in the twenty-first century was first defined by the 9/11 attacks and the obsessive “truther” conspiracism that followed them. By the time that burst of conspiracism faded, the election of Barack Obama brought the racist right-wing conspiracism that lurked beneath the surface to prominence in American politics.

Despite the panoply of different conspiracy theories that arose between Nesta Webster and 9/11, none has wholly disappeared. In part, this is because the technologies of social media have made it easy to rekindle and spread any conspiracy theory. The dominant strand of conspiracism—the continuum from secret government to hidden hand to one-worlder to new world order—continues to be widely propagated, with perhaps an infinite number of subtle variations. Texe Marrs, for example, promotes a basic Zionist conspiracy with roots in the Kabbalah. Herbert G. Dorsey III recycled Webster’s thesis with particular emphasis on the Knights Templar. Miguel Bruno Duarte’s “shadow government” is primarily the work of the Illuminati, with Communist and Freemasonic support. Deanna Spingola focuses solely on the Rothschilds. David Allen Rivera provides an apocalyptic end-times interpretation. And Doc Marquis offers an occult version in which the Protocols were created by the Illuminati to discredit the Jews while the Illuminati establish Satan as “their Masonic Christ.”2 There are many more.

There is hardly a topic that contemporary conspiracists have allowed to disappear. Ellen McClay devoted her 2008 talk at the National Conference on Private Property Rights to the rise of UNESCO. Fundamentalist David Stewart, in his attack on evolution, brings back the specter of G. Brock Chisholm, Canadian psychiatrist and head of the World Health Organization until 1953. Conspiracy theorist Jennifer Lake was still fighting the polio vaccine conspiracy in 2008; Charlotte Iserbyt extolled the merits of the 1953 Reece Committee hearings on philanthropic foundations in a 2011 Alex Jones interview. Long-time John Birch Society member Alan Stang explained once again that Franklin Roosevelt “arranged” the attack on Pearl Harbor. And Glenn Beck generated some blowback by promoting Elizabeth Dilling’s 1934 Red Network as well as the works of the intensely antisemitic Eustace Mullins.3

In keeping with the improvisational nature of modern conspiracy theorizing, other ideas have been merged with the standard new world order conspiracy. Jüri Lina interprets the Illuminati’s overthrow of czarist Russia within an astrological framework, while David Allen Rivera’s two-and-a-half-hour PowerPoint presentation explains his apocalyptic conspiracy using the movie The Matrix, and P. D. Stuart explains how the American Revolution turned the United States into “a Jesuit enclave.” Alex Christopher’s “ultimate ‘Unseen Hand’” behind the Illuminati turns out to be the railroad industry, a fact Christopher learned from a man who had actually “participated in the organizational plans for the ‘New World Order.’” For Christopher Jon Bjerknes, the entire Zionist conspiracy centers on Albert Einstein.4 Conspiracists from across the decades have been cited and their ideas recycled. Charlotte Iserbyt “suspects” that she owns the only surviving copy of the American Historical Association’s 1934 Report of the Commission on Social Studies, which lays out the “plan for a Socialist America.” (She does not.) Both Miguel Duarte and David Rivera bring back the same misinterpretation of Carroll Quigley’s work that led Quigley to sue right-wing conspiracists in the 1960s. And Jüri Lina buys Major General Count Cherep-Spiridovich’s claim that German chancellor Bismarck was aware of the Jewish hidden hand conspiracy to assassinate Lincoln and tried to thwart it.5

Other conspiracies have survived as well, although some now have seemingly few followers. Conspiracy theories having to do with health, medicine, and nutrition held their own or even gathered momentum in the early years of the century. Conspiratorial ideas about HIV/AIDS, for example, showed no sign of fading away, and every subsequent epidemic, right up to the Zika virus, has generated suspicions ranging from Big Pharma’s profiting on death to new world order population control.6 Similarly, the conspiracism that led to widespread suspicion of vaccines (primarily measles, mumps, and rubella vaccination, but with spillover effects) continues to have a great many casual adherents.7 Other health threats have had their ups and downs. The conspiratorial end of the opposition to genetically modified foods seems to be holding its own. The view that chemtrails exist and are part of the plan to kill off or stupefy millions of people is riding high at present. But the cancer threat posed by electromagnetic fields near power lines and even fear of the mind-controlling High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program (HAARP) have faded considerably.8

9/11 and the Truth

All other conspiracy theories faded—at least for a while—in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, the only event since the Kennedy assassination powerful enough to generate extensive conspiracies of its own. Most of the avalanche of conspiratorial interpretation of 9/11 took place outside the long-established frameworks of conspiracism. The two basic “theories” around which suspicions gelled were LIHOP (let it happen on purpose) and MIHOP (made it happen on purpose). The LIHOP allegation was basically that the Bush administration knew (or suspected) that an attack was coming but did nothing to prevent it so it could pursue its war plans in the Middle East. The more severe MIHOP allegation was that the attacks were a false flag operation carried out by the Bush administration for the same reason. Both terms cover a variety of scenarios. The LIHOP scenarios are conceptually simple, and they barely rise to the level of conspiracy “theory.” The MIHOP scenarios, in contrast, are genuinely theoretical, involving many more participants, long-term planning, and a leap of faith. In practice though, the line between LIHOP and MIHOP is often skirted, as illustrated by David Ray Griffin, a major voice of 9/11 conspiracism, in his book The New Pearl Harbor:

I have often been asked whether there are any “smoking guns” pointing to complicity by the Bush administration. This is a question I did not explicitly address in the body of the book. Rather than focusing on those reported events that most strongly suggest such complicity, I instead presented a cumulative argument, suggesting that what is most persuasive, assuming the truth of at least a significant portion of the reported evidence, is that so many lines of evidence all seem to point in the same direction. . . . I said, in other words, that we have some prima facie smoking guns.9

The degree to which 9/11 conspiracism was genuinely spontaneous and self-contained is reflected in the obsessive attention paid to technical details, media inconsistencies, and timelines (e.g., “Despite this extensive body of credible evidence establishing Flight 93’s impact time at 10.06am, NORAD and the 9/11 Commission asserted that the impact was at 10.03am.”). This ad hoc, context-free conspiracism was often criticized, especially after “trutherism” began to decline. The Guardian excoriated the prominent MIHOP film Loose Change for depicting “a closed world: comprehensible, controllable, small,” and thus easier to deal with than “the chaos which really governs our lives.”10 Nevertheless, around the edges of 9/11 conspiracism, many people did try to put the event in a larger context of familiar conspiratorial figures. One obvious choice was the Illuminati. Dominion theologian Gary North used the attack to repeat his Illuminati-oriented rehash of Carroll Quigley’s ideas. Rick Martin used the attack to expose the Illuminati’s long-range goal of “elimination of most of the world’s human population.” Although some members of Congress were aware of the Illuminati’s plans, Martin claimed, they were frightened into silence when their fellow congressman Gary Condit “was made a patsy in the abduction and subsequent murder of Chandra Levy.”11

Some of these efforts were extremely idiosyncratic, perhaps the work of just one person. One such theorist, under the moniker the Smoking Man, noted the “startling coincidences” linking 9/11 with the Oklahoma City bombing. Building his case on the fact that “20th hijacker” Zacarias Moussaoui had attended flight-training school at Max Westheimer Airport near Norman, Oklahoma, Smoking Man notes that “a squadron of the Civil Air Patrol (CAP) . . . still gathers at Westheimer every week. Coincidentally, several of the alleged 9/11 hijackers rented apartments in Delray Beach, Florida from a woman whose husband was a member of the CAP.”12 Equally bizarre but more thoroughgoing is an article posted by the Awaken Research Group (“Debunking ‘Caveman’ Conspiracy Theories since 2002”). A saga going back to the 1980s details a 9/11 conspiracy designed primarily to benefit the Teachers Insurance and Annuity Association—College Retirement Equities Fund for university professors. Among the conspirators were the Massachusetts Institute of Technology plasma and fusion lab, North Atlantic Treaty Organization, the Bonanno organized crime family, the Teamsters Union, JPMorgan Chase, the Boeing Corporation, and of course Hillary Clinton, who together managed to fight off New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s efforts to expose the false flag attack they used to cover their theft of hundreds of billions of dollars.13

There have been efforts to link the 9/11 attacks to the Kennedy assassination, but these have been no more enduring than these idiosyncratic conspiracies. Radio host Philip Coppens maintained that “the ‘lone assassin’ template” used to deny Kennedy assassination conspiracy theories could be at work with 9/11, but this works only if one thinks of Osama Bin Laden as a lone assassin. Coppens went on to list parallels between the two events. Citing Operation Northwoods, a military proposal for secret action against Cuba that was rejected by Kennedy, Coppens ignores the nonexistence of the operation, saying: “Substitute Cuba with Afghanistan and Iraq and 9/11 is born.” Gary Kohls, of Medical Professionals for 9/11 Truth, echoes the (anti-)lone assassin argument but focuses more on “the obvious false flag operation of 9/11,” which he likens to several others—“the Berlin Reichstag Fire, Operation Northwoods, and the Gulf of Tonkin episodes (google them) readily come to mind.” Kohls’s writing displays the obsessive nature of much of the 9/11 conspiracism: “To continue to ignore the truths uncovered by the multitudes of thoughtful, highly intelligent and courageous prophetic voices world-wide and to continue to believe the absurd official theories when there is overwhelming evidence to the contrary is to go helplessly along with the evil agenda of shadowy, exploitative, psychopathic powers that are not your friends.”14 Most of those who find connections between 9/11 and the Kennedy assassination are in the “deep politics” camp pioneered by Peter Dale Scott. By linking “deep events” (those that reveal the workings of “the deep state, that part of the state that is not publicly accountable”), Scott and others try to piece together the clandestine power structure. In much of this analysis, similarity between the roads to American attacks on Cuba and in Iraq is key.15

The most widely believed of the larger 9/11 conspiracy theories blamed the attacks, not surprisingly, on the Jews. This was certainly the case across the Muslim world, where “conspiracy theories about the Mossad’s culpability for the attacks mushroomed.” (The Mossad is Israel’s Intelligence Service.) Although Muslims in the Middle East had long been obsessed with conspiracy theories centered on Israel, “a new and more aggressive form of conspiracy theory and attendant demonization of the ‘conspirators’ took on worldwide proportions.”16 The Anti-Defamation League’s investigation supported the importance of the Mossad to conspiracy theories centering on Israeli government or corporate spying in America. This tied in with the “WTC7” subtheory, in which the 7 World Trade Center building was destroyed on purpose to eliminate incriminating documents. The second major antisemitic conspiracy theory laid out a vague financial plot according to which the “Jewish owners” of the World Trade Center orchestrated the attack for the insurance money.17

The same array of charges that circulated in the Middle East dominated the conspiracy theories of the right-wing (and especially white supremacist) elements in the United States. Headlines in the intensely antisemitic newspaper The Truth at Last charged that Israeli firms had moved out of the World Trade Center before the attack and that the FBI was questioning Israelis about spying. Ohio congressional candidate Jim Condit took advantage of the fact that campaign ads cannot be censored to air TV spots featuring claims such as: “Many competent researchers believe that pro-Israeli, pro-New World Order traitors pulled off the 9-11 terror attacks” as part of their effort to establish “world tyranny headquartered in Jerusalem.” The aged Eustace Mullins declared the attacks to be “essentially a Mossad campaign, spearheaded by the ADL.” (In his paranoia, Mullins appeared to view 9/11 as a subsidiary operation of the campaign by the ADL and the Gannett Newspapers to discredit him personally.) Gordon “Jack” Mohr, who claimed to have predicted an attack “such as” 9/11 because of “the illegal and unscriptural acts of our government . . . as we have appeased the antichrists of Zionism,” expressed surprise that this analysis led to his being “reviled as a ‘hatemonger.’” Mohr’s September 2001 Terrorist Intelligence Report summarized the entire hidden hand conspiracy, beginning with the establishment of the Federal Reserve System and culminating in control over America by the “heathen ‘blood suckers’” of the Zionist Occupation Government. America allowed this to happen, according to Mohr, and thus the 9/11 attacks are merely “the evil chickens of our DISOBEDIENCE to God . . . ‘coming home to roost.’”18

The Zionist-Israeli conspiracy has shown considerable staying power even as general attachment to 9/11 conspiracy theories has declined. In 2009, the ADL noted with alarm the prevalence of antisemitic 9/11 conspiracy posts on the internet. Louisiana-based Nazi David Duke did not question Al-Qaeda’s role in the attacks but excused them as resistance to Jewish domination. Duke argued that “the Jewish-Supremacist controlled media” would never question the official story since then “they will have to admit the power and control which Jewish Supremacists have over Western governments.” Louis Farrakhan went further, flatly accusing “lying, murderous Zionist Jews” for the attacks.19 Illuminati conspiracist Henry Makow, abridging an unspecified work by 9/11 conspiracist Christopher Bollyn, dug into the past of William Jeffrey, director of the National Institute of Standards and Technology when that organization issued a 2005 report on the destruction of the world Trade Center. Makow could discredit the report since Jeffrey was a “crypto Jew” whose father had changed the family’s surname from Jaffe to Jeffrey in 1952. This connection between Zionism and 9/11 is used less to explain the attacks than as just another club with which to beat the Jews. As one example, Joy Karega, like other antisemites, not only supported Louis Farrakhan’s views on 9/11 but also accused Israel of the Charlie Hebdo killings in Paris and of shooting down a Malaysian airliner over the Ukraine, bringing back the specter of Jacob Rothschild in the process. She was fired as an assistant professor at Oberlin College.

Obama’s New World Order

As a boon to conspiracism, just as 9/11 was beginning to fade, Barack Obama was elected president. Even before his election, lawsuits challenged his citizenship, giving rise to the “birther” movement. Birtherism was not the first such attack on a president. Franklin Roosevelt’s “Jewish ancestry” had been bandied about by conspiracists in the 1930s but never rose to the level of an issue. By 2008, however, media and politics had changed enough that the even more implausible charge that Obama was born in Kenya (or Indonesia) found a wide audience.20 Such people as Donald Trump, TV money enthusiast Lou Dobbs, and “family values” presidential candidate Alan Keyes repeated and added to the conspiracy, and among Republican voters it was widely believed. On the reemerging neo-patriot right, birtherism provided a fresh opportunity to challenge the government. In “An Open Letter to Barack Obama,” We the People Foundation chairman Robert Schulz stressed the “escalating constitutional crisis” that would follow from having “a usurper” in the White House, a crisis that could not be resolved legally: “Congress would be unable to remove you, a usurper, from the Office of the President on Impeachment, inviting certain political chaos including a potential for armed conflicts within the General Government or among the States and the People to effect the removal of such a usurper.”21

This level of conspiracism did not emerge from nothing. Years of 9/11 trutherism had helped make conspiracism a familiar, even acceptable, approach to politics. Moreover, there were specific connections between trutherism and birtherism. Frank Gaffney, a disenchanted Reagan administration defense spokesman who accused Obama of hiding both his Kenyan birth and Muslim religion, had earlier invented a MIHOP 9/11 theory that placed conservative activist Grover Norquist at the center of the conspiracy. Philip Berg, who brought an early suit challenging Obama’s eligibility, had in 2004 filed a LIHOP lawsuit against George W. Bush, alleging a FEMA plan to establish a secret government. Orly Taitz, a California lawyer who filed a similar suit on behalf of Alan Keyes’s American Independent Party, abandoned the legal route after a judge fined her $20,000 for using the court for “a political agenda disconnected from any legitimate legal cause of action.” Taitz promoted a conspiracy according to which Obama would fill FEMA concentration camps with his enemies. (The sudden attention to FEMA may well reflect the unpleasant publicity that agency received during and after Hurricane Katrina in 2005.)22

Antigovernment conspiracism became institutionalized during the 2008 election and throughout Obama’s first term as president. For example, opposition to the North American Union and its supposed “NAFTA Super Highway” roared back to life. As shaped by conspiracy-minded Obama opponents such as Pat Buchanan, Lou Dobbs, and Jerome Corsi (all of whom promoted the birther charges), those issues were transformed into a direct assault on American sovereignty. Similarly, a July 2008 conference sponsored by Tom DeWeese’s antienvironmental American Policy Center and Phyllis Schlafly’s “pro-family” Eagle Forum introduced the United Nations 1992 sustainable development plan, Agenda 21, to the conspiracy world. This “anti-human document” represented the new world order’s “new world theology” of replacing God with nature. The John Birch Society (for which the 2008 conference marked a return to prominence) also attacked “The New False Religion,” claiming that “advocates of UN world government have drafted an Earth Charter, which they compare to the Ten Commandments and keep in an ‘Ark of Hope.’”23

Militia groups, which had peaked in 1996 before beginning a ten-year decline, rebounded from perhaps fifty in number in 2007 to over two hundred by 2009. The Obama election also corresponded with a spike in sovereign citizen threats against judges and prosecutors and an increase in tax resisters sufficient to cause the Department of Justice to create a National Tax Defier Initiative.24 New groups, many drawing on the 1990s patriot movement, proliferated. Just after the election of Obama, Robert Schulz (whose “usurper” ad was about to appear in the Chicago Tribune) gathered more than a hundred “delegates” from across the country to plan “Continental Congress 2009.” Schulz had emerged out of the tax resister movement, while his co-organizer, Edwin Vieira, and many of the delegates had been active in the militias of the 1990s. Nativists and neo-confederates were represented, including one Robert Crooks, creator of a video demonstrating “how to keep a Home Depot parking lot empty” by shooting immigrants as they tried to cross the border. Continental Congress 2009 tried to draw in people affected by the economic collapse of 2008. A flyer advertising this “Historical People’s Summit,” which devoted much of its space to explaining that income tax is “a legal and constitutional fraud,” began:

401(k) Losses? Unemployed? Foreclosed? There is a CAUSE . . . and a SOLUTION!

Our nation suffers because we have abandoned the Constitution

Economic catastrophe resulting directly from the privately-owned Federal Reserve bank cartel and fiat currency based on limitless debt

Unconstitutionally imposed, unapportioned, direct (slave) taxes on the labor of Americans

Unconstitutional bailouts of private banks and endless Middle-East military conflicts started unlawfully without a formal “Declaration of War”

And the most grievous injury: A servant government that refuses to be held accountable by responding to the People’s repeated Petitions for Redress of Grievances

This is, of course, the same international banking conspiracy pioneered by secret government conspiracists decades earlier. And in case anyone might overlook the role of the Fed, the People’s Summit was held on Jekyll Island, Georgia, where the Federal Reserve System was created. Participants were showered with information about Obama’s agenda that would “collapse the Republic,” the menace of sustainable development, the plan by the government to use “transportation choke points” to round up troublemakers and send them to FEMA camps, and many other conspiracist greatest hits.25

In March 2009, the Oath Keepers was created by Stewart Rhodes, a former Ron Paul libertarian. Rhodes had laid out his vision of the threat facing America a year earlier when Hillary Clinton was the frontrunner for the Democratic nomination:

Imagine that Herr Hitlery is sworn in as president in 2009. After a conveniently timed “domestic terrorism” event (just a coincidence, of course) . . . she promptly crams a United Nations mandated total ban on the private possession of firearms . . . proclaiming a national emergency and declaring the entire militia movement (and anyone else Morris Dees labels “extremists”) to be “enemy combatants.” . . . Hitlery declares that such citizens are subject to military tribunal hand-picked by the dominatrix-in-chief herself. Hitlery then orders police, National Guard troops and active military to go house-to-house to disarm the American people and “black bag” those on a list of “known terrorists,” with orders to shoot all resisters.26

The way to head off this standard militia conspiracy nightmare was to ensure that police and military would in fact keep their oaths to uphold the Constitution by refusing to obey the government’s orders to round everyone up and put them in concentration camps. Rhodes’s group was, to a remarkable degree, a retread of Jack McLamb’s early 1990s group Police against the New World Order, whose 1992 “action plan” laid out the same threat and remedy. In order to “stop or ‘kill off’ the ongoing, elitist, covert operation which has been installed in the American system with great stealth and cunning,” those who signed on to McLamb’s Operation Vampire Killer 2000 resolved that “WE WILL, BY EVERY MEANS GIVEN UNTO US, UPHOLD OUR OATHS AND FULFILL OUR SWORN DUTY TO OUR COUNTRYMEN.”27

Leaders of the neo-militia and patriot groups worked closely together. Rhodes and Richard Mack were heavily involved in Second Amendment marches and rallies. Mack and McLamb worked the “anti-government speaking circuit” together. Mack combined the Oath Keeper idea with William Gale’s posse comitatus idea to create the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association. Reviving the idea that the county sheriff held ultimate legal authority, Mack declared them to be “constitutionally empowered to be able to keep federal agents out of the county.”28 Another old militia hand, Mike Vanderboegh, formed a more civilian-based group to defend the Constitution. Vanderboegh’s III Percent Patriots were named after the notion that only 3 percent of the colonists rose up against British oppression during the American Revolution. Although not legally bound by an oath, Three Percenters were no less resolved to fulfill their duty to their countrymen: “The Three Percent today are gun owners who will not disarm, will not compromise and will no longer back up at the passage of the next gun control act. . . . We will not obey any further circumscription of our traditional liberties and will defend ourselves if attacked. . . . We are committed to the restoration of the Founders’ Republic, and are willing to fight, die, and, if forced by any would-be oppressor, kill in the defense of ourselves and the constitution that we all took an oath to uphold against enemies foreign and domestic.”29 Between the election of 2008 and the end of President Obama’s first term, dozens, perhaps hundreds of such groups were established. The John Birch Society had been reborn to the point where it cosponsored the 2010 Conservative Political Action Conference meeting. Some no doubt faded away and some may have been web-only groups, but the upsurge was still impressive. A few at random: the Tenth Amendment Center (nullifiers), Freedom Advocates, the oxymoronically named Sovereignty International, the Christian Liberty Guard (to judge from their website photo, four men and two dogs), Restore the Republic, the neo-Klan organization League of the South, the Third Continental Congress, and Christian Exodus, a group determined to establish theocracy in South Carolina.30

Many of these minor groups faded away after Obama’s reelection, but they did not all disappear. Some were reduced to their core membership “who feel as if they have lost their only home. . . . They get increasingly frustrated and sometimes go out in a blaze of glory.” The result was an increase in “lone wolf” and small group attacks. At the same time, a troubling increase in reported connections between such groups and the military was beginning to emerge. These were not well received reports—a 2009 Department of Homeland Security report was downplayed largely because it reported that the “willingness of a small percentage of military personnel to join extremist groups during the 1990s because they were disgruntled, disillusioned, or suffering from the psychological effects of war is being replicated today.”31 While the military may be reluctant to admit it, it has been plagued by this problem, as neo-Nazis and RaHoWa fighters find military bases to be fertile ground.32

Obama’s election marked the third burst of right-wing conspiracism since around 1970, when Christian Identity groups and the fading neo-Nazi groups built on white fears and rural resentment to create the conspiracist idea that the federal government would eliminate their racial privilege and run roughshod over their land. Early militias, the Aryan Nations, and the Posse Comitatus embodied this thinking. As these groups in turn began to wane in the 1990s, a series of deadly confrontations—Gordon Kahl, Randy Weaver, Waco—generated a surge of new, much more violent groups, a wave that expanded rapidly before fading after the 9/11 attacks. With Obama’s election came a new type of group: militia-like, but more respectable—Mike Vanderboegh’s Three Percenters, Stewart Rhodes’s Oath Keepers, Richard Mack’s Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association. Although distinct, these groups overlapped and many of their leaders interacted regularly with the Tea Party and other conservative groups. Right-wing conspiracism was about to enter the political mainstream.