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
In 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-Masonic4 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.”
It’s not clear who or what the Beast is. (Based on my reading of the full interview, I’d say Stone himself hadn’t quite figured it out.) But the details are beside the point. What is crucial to Stone is his conviction that Nixon, MLK, and the two Kennedys were somehow done in by the same people. As with the Protocols’ fixation on a few dozen Jewish Elders (a collective sometimes called “All-Judaan” by Henry Ford and other anti-Semites) the conspiracist mind unfailingly compresses life’s many random evils into a single, identifiable point-source of malign power. As discussed in Chapters 5 and 6, this tendency is one of conspiracism’s main psychological consolations.
The label placed on this evil font varies. Modern conspiracist movements fixate on the Council on Foreign Relations, the Bilderberg Group, the Trilateral Commission or—in the case of the 9/11 Truth movement—some sort of Cheney-led “neocon” Star Chamber. Old-school conspiracists insist the real demons are the Illuminati, Freemasons, Jesuits, Opus Dei, Knights Templar, Philosophes, Carbonari, Prieuré de Sion, Rosicrucians, or the like. In extreme cases, the supposed evil masterminds aren’t even human: Influential British Truther David Icke, for instance, claims that ultimate power lies with extraterrestrial “Prison Warders”—who control events on earth (including 9/11) through a human clique known as “the Global Elite.” But insofar as a conspiracist’s psychic appetites are concerned, the evildoers’ actual identities are interchangeable.
In some cases, quite literally interchangeable: Deceased right-wing UFO conspiracy theorist Milton William Cooper, author of the apocalyptic 1991 tract Behold a Pale Horse, explicitly endorsed the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and reprinted it for his readers . . . but warned them that the document “has been written intentionally to deceive people. For clear understanding, the word ‘Zion’ should be ‘Sion’; any reference to Jews should be replaced with the word ‘Illuminati’; and the word ‘goyim’ should be replaced with the word ‘cattle.’ ” Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh, and Henry Lincoln—the three pseudohistorians whose theories about Jesus Christ traveling to France as a husband and father became the basis for much of Dan Brown’s conspiracy fiction—have a similar theory about the Protocols: “There was an original text [of the Protocols]that was not a forgery. On the contrary, it was authentic. But it had nothing whatever to do with Judaism or an ‘international Jewish conspiracy.’ It issued, rather, from some Masonic organization or masonically oriented secret society that incorporated the word ‘Sion.’ ” (Icke, incidentally, believes the Protocols were written by lizard people as part of an intergalactic plan to impose reptilian control over Planet Earth.)
This psychic need to impute all evil to a lone, omnipotent source inevitably requires the conspiracist to create larger and larger metaconspiracies that sweep together seemingly unconnected power centers. This is why, as discussed in the previous chapter, modern conspiracy theorists are so fond of flowcharts—in which all of society’s actors can systematically be grouped into cascading hierarchies that soar upwards to a single, ultimate puppetmaster.
Anti-Semitic conspiracy theorists couldn’t explain the origins of the First World War, which began when control of Europe was split up between a half-dozen major European powers—except by somehow imagining that all of them secretly answered to some common Jewish overlord. Likewise has the John Birch Society (JBS) declared Hillary Clinton and the world’s communists to be partners in an Illuminati-driven plot to conquer the world—along with coconspirators Dick Cheney and Wall Street. In his 1991 book New World Order, Pat Robertson pulled the same trick, arguing that America’s political and economic elites were in league with Bolsheviks to engineer a Soviet takeover of the United States. Intergalactic conspiracy theorist David Icke explained the power struggle between Israel and the Arab world this way: “Have you ever wondered why the ‘home’ of Islam, Saudi Arabia, says and does nothing in the face of what is being visited upon the Arab world? There is a reason for this. The House of Saud is a fake front for the House of Rothschild, and they are not ‘Arabs’ or ‘Muslims’ at all. They are Rothschild Zionists who can be traced back to a Jewish man called Mordakhai bin Ibrahim bin Moshe. Researchers say this was in the year AD 851.”
One leading 9/11 Truther, Washington, D.C.–based career conspiracist Webster Tarpley (profiled later in this book), provides a helpful flowchart on page 77 of his epic 2005 tract 9/11 Synthetic Terror: Made in U.S.A. demonstrating the hierarchical relationship between “paramilitary terror pros,” “big business,” and “corrupt private networks”—with everyone in the chart answering to the top cell, a cartoon octopus labeled with the single word “oligarchy.” Who this oligarchy is, Tarpley doesn’t tell us—except to hypothesize vaguely that it probably consists of “financier factions.” But again, the oligarchy’s exact identity isn’t the point. What matters is that it exists as a unified, malign presence.
Many conspiracists will even project their fantasies backward through history—so that time itself does not compromise their protagonists’ monopoly on evil. Some 9/11 conspiracists implicate the Bush family in the murder of JFK and (as noted in Chapter 1) the Nazi war machine. Alex Jones goes back further—viewing 9/11 as just the latest barbarism inflicted by a satanic network that has been “steering planetary affairs for hundreds of years.” Lyndon LaRouche’s publishing house has promoted the theory that Jewish bankers and religious leaders have been involved in a massive conspiracy stretching back to ancient times—with an especially creepy emphasis on the role played by Shylockian “Venetian bankers” of the Renaissance era. Sergei Nilus, the original Russian publisher of the Protocols, went even further, tracing the Jewish conspiracy back three thousand years: “According to the records of secret Jewish Zionism, Solomon and other Jewish learned men already, in 929 B.C., thought out a scheme in theory for a peaceful conquest of the whole universe by Zion.” In an introduction to the Protocols, the author sketches the historical path of the “Symbolic Snake of Zion” through the great crises of Western civilization—Greece in 429 B.C., Augustan Rome, Madrid in the age of Charles V, and, of course, that singular obsession of anti-Semites for more than two centuries, the French Revolution.
The onset of this sort of obsessive historical monomania is often the canary in the intellectual coal mine when sober-minded pundits transmute into conspiracists. A good contemporary example is left-wing crusader Naomi Klein, who became a superstar of the antiglobalization circuit in 2000 with her anticorporate manifesto No Logo. Over the next seven years, Klein’s increasingly radicalized hunt for corporate demons launched her into the realm of full-fledged conspiratorial fantasy. By the time she’d published her 2007 book The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, Klein had convinced herself that the world was controlled by a cabal of hypercapitalists who’d been personally recruited and indoctrinated by U.S. economist Milton Friedman. Like the European anti-Semites who believed that Jews supported both sides in Europe’s great wars, Klein casts her Friedmanite villains as equal-opportunity architects, enablers, and cheerleaders of all manner of human misery—from the 2005 Asian tsunami, to Hurricane Katrina, to slaughter in Iraq—motivated by the single goal of intimidating societies into accepting free trade and globalization. In one particularly far-fetched section, Klein even suggests that the state of Israel is a willing promoter of the terrorism campaign against its Jewish civilians—because the “continual and continuously expanding war on terror” helps inflate the profits of the country’s “high-tech security” industries.
The 9/11 Truthers follow this reductionist tradition faithfully—theorizing that Washington and al-Qaeda’s jihadis secretly play on the same team. British-based Truther Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed—whose early published work set the stage for many of the American conspiracy theorists who emerged in the years after 9/11—argued that the term “al-Qaeda” was real, but only to the extent that it referred to “a database of [CIA-controlled] pseudo-Islamist covert operations recruits.” California-based Michael Ruppert, similarly argues that “there is a compelling case to be made that Osama bin Laden has long been a well-cultivated, protected, and valued asset of U.S. and British intelligence.”
And why didn’t Barack Obama spill the beans about all this when he took power in 2010? The answer is obvious: America’s major parties are both bought-and-paid subsidiaries of the same all-controlling Beast.
Boundless Evil
Right-wing conspiracists traditionally have railed against the international campaign to reduce global warming, which they regard as a pretext to destroy national sovereignty and impose a world government. Even so, the 2009 Copenhagen conference on climate change stood out as a subject of special agitation. This time, the world leaders meeting in Denmark weren’t seeking merely to create a hyperenvironmentalist UN dictatorship, conspiracist websites claimed: They actually were plotting to annihilate whole swathes of humanity.
Texas-based syndicated radio host Alex Jones led the charge on his December 11 broadcast:
Do you understand how diabolical this is? It isn’t a bunch of idiot tree-huggers that mean well and just got their science wrong. These are vicious Nazis—it’s the only way to describe them. But in truth, they’re worse than the Nazis . . . They [the Malthusians] came up with this idea to exterminate, and reduce births . . . It is life and death! These people are taking over right now! . . . Did you get the memo not to drink the water. Did you get the memo not to take the inoculations . . . ? Do you like being sterilized? Do you like being killed?! You better grow up, ladies and gentlemen. You better realize that we’re facing a threat far more dangerous than Mao Tse Tung and Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin and Vladimir Lenin! . . . This is the New World Order crashing the gates. They’re spilling over the wall. If this was the Alamo . . . Those of us fighting the globalists, we’re like Davey Crockett, we’re out of ammo, we’re swinging our muskets. A lot of us are going to get killed, we’re going to get imprisoned. This is only going to get worse in the years to come. But, you take my life, I take yours, too.
This tirade captures many of the modern conspiracist obsessions—vaccines, mass sterilization, apocalyptic confrontation. But the aspect that jumps out more immediately is the manner in which Jones describes his imagined “globalist” enemies: as foes who are not merely as evil as the totalitarian monsters of the twentieth century, but somehow worse. What Jones has in mind isn’t just evil on the scale of a mass murderer or a terrorist, or even a genocidal sociopath, but rather on the science-fiction scale of Sauron from Lord of the Rings, Darth Vader (Star Wars), or SkyNet (The Terminator). In his 2007 film Endgame, Jones claims that “a world government is just the beginning. Once in place, [the New World Order] can engage their plan to exterminate 80 percent of the world’s population, while enabling the ‘elites’ to live forever with the aid of advanced technology.”
In support of such claims, Truthers tick off a long list of episodes in which the U.S. government has killed innocents on a large scale: Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Vietnam, the proxy wars of Central America, sanctions in Iraq. The death toll of 9/11, by this telling, is a mere rounding error for our utterly amoral leaders. Toronto-based conspiracy theorists Terry Burrows and Ian Woods explain the elites’ mindset this way:
Such perpetrators are not normal. They are psychopaths—individuals lacking both empathy and conscience, self-centered to the extreme, driven by their insatiable lust for power and control. [Their] New World Order is intended to be a totalitarian feudal dictatorship where a super-wealthy and over-privileged few will completely dominate and control an entire planet of impoverished serfs, imprisoned by a high-tech global surveillance matrix . . . This ‘Diaboligarchy’ uses wars and catastrophes (which the members themselves instigate) to break down natural human resistance to their corrupt enterprise, which is now approaching its endgame. The predominance of individuals devoid of empathy for the feelings and sufferings of others—operating without conscience at the very centers of corrupt power and intending to dominate the human race totally—makes them mankind’s greatest natural predators.
The notion of some sort of “diaboligarchy” pops up in almost every corner of the conspiracist universe, dating back all the way to the earliest forms of Christian anti-Jewish propaganda, in which unconverted Jews were portrayed as demonic servants of the Antichrist; and the campaign of extermination against them, by corollary, a form of existential human obligation that became the jihad of the Nazi religion. “The Jewish world-conspiracy was seen as the product of an ineradicable destructiveness, a will to evil which was believed to be inborn in every Jew,” Norman Cohn wrote. “A peculiar breed of sub-human beings, dark, earthbound, was working conspiratorially to destroy these sons of light, the ‘Aryan’ or Germanic ‘race,’ and the Protocols contained their plan of campaign . . . When the Protocols came into contact with the völkisch-racist outlook the result was an apocalyptic vision not only of contemporary politics but all history and indeed of all human existence on the planet.”
As Jones’ rant shows, modern conspiracy theorists have picked up this theme of “ineradicable destructiveness,” but placed it in a secular context. In describing the motives of the imagined evildoers, the one word that constantly pops up is “control”—of oil, gold, money, blood (as described in more detail later in this chapter). The villain is portrayed as the ultimate control freak, so pathologically freakish, in fact, that he slips the bindings of human morality. (In this regard, the villains may be a projection of conspiracy theorists’ own frustrated drive to impose order on a chaotic world—but I’ll admit that this is merely pop-psychological speculation on my part.)
In Truther mythology, it is assumed that the CIA and Pentagon will do literally anything to advance their dark plots—even the wholesale massacre of schoolchildren: Thierry Meyssan, the French Truther whose 2002 Pentagate kicked off the conspiracy theory that no plane hit the Pentagon on 9/11, told me in a phone interview from his home in Lebanon that the terrorists who attacked an elementary school in Beslan, North Ossetia, were drugged dupes deployed by the CIA. As noted elsewhere, influential Truther Michael Ruppert believes the 9/11 plot is part of a long-term conspiracy aimed at exterminating most of humankind: “Who among us cannot picture the war criminal Henry Kissinger—protégé of David Rockefeller—sitting back in his chair and muttering with his German accent, ‘The problem is not that there is too little oil. The problem is just that there are too many people.’ ”
On this point, Ruppert quotes CIA deputy director Higgins from the 1975 film Three Days of the Condor: “It’s simple economics. Today it’s oil. In 10 or 15 years . . . food. Maybe even sooner. Now what do you think the people are gonna want us to do then? . . . Ask them when there’s no heat in their homes and they’re cold. Ask them when their engines stop. Ask them when people who’ve never known hunger start going hungry.” (Like a surprisingly large number of conspiracy theorists, Ruppert likes to prove his point by reference to Hollywood movies.) He also footnotes fellow conspiracy theorist Jay Hanson, who similarly sees the end of oil as the beginning of the apocalypse:
In less than 20 years, the self-regulating market system will have “run out of gas” and vanished. With the market system gone, the ruling elites will fall back on the good old-fashioned means of control: a police state. In the United States alone, 200 million guns in private ownership guarantee that this police state will quickly devolve into rebellion and anarchy. If the anarchy scenario were to reach its natural conclusion, the global elites would be eliminated by the angry masses. Those who managed to escape would die more miserably than the poor since they are unsuited for day-to-day survival because they lived their lives like queen bees. But when the above scenario seems inevitable, the elites will simply depopulate most of the planet with a bioweapon. When the time comes, it will be the only logical solution to their problem. It’s a first-strike tactic that leaves the built-infrastructure and other species in place and allows the elites to perpetuate their own genes into the foreseeable future . . . The global genocide will be rationalized as a second chance for humanity—a new Garden of Eden—a new Genesis. The temptation will prove irresistible.
A prominent corollary to this line of thinking is the notion that our overlords are, even today, using the medical system to systematically “cull the herd” with exotic diseases and infected medications. One of the most famous AIDS conspiracy tracts of the 1980s—the so-called Strecker Memorandum—argued that the AIDS virus was developed jointly by the National Cancer Institute, World Health Organization, and U.S. military as part of a plot “to exhaust America with hatred, struggle, want, confusion, and inoculation of disease,” and thereby “speed the Soviet Union toward its goal of world domination.”
Many UFO conspiracists believe that AIDS is part of “the gray alien agenda,” whose goal is to clear away humankind in order to make way for a terrestrial alien colony. Other conspiracists believe that the H1N1 virus is a man-made disease, and that the vaccines we’ve been offered for it are actually poisons that will do nothing but increase the death toll. In the Arab world, conspiracy theorists imagine great legions of Mengele-like Jewish doctors roaming the world, committing an endless list of vile plots. Following Haiti’s 2010 earthquake, for instance, a Syrian television feature about Israel’s humanitarian mission to Port au Prince told viewers that the mission’s real purpose was “to steal organs from the corpses of the Haitian dead.”
In all of these claims, one finds echoes of the Protocols, in which the mythical Herzl stalks Basel like a crazed sociopath, rhapsodizing about “the complete wrecking of that Christian religion,” and urging Jews to harness their “burning greediness, merciless vengeance, hatred and malice” to expedite “the killing out of the Goyim.” Like the conspiracy theories it inspired, the Protocols reads more like a satire of human evil than a catalog.
Incumbency
In Spring 1918, the end of the First World War was just months away. But in the United States, Washington’s first Red Scare—which would climax with the infamous Palmer Raids of 1919 and 1920—was just heating up. One target was former Minnesota congressman Charles August Lindbergh, a conspiracist firebrand who’d immigrated to the United States in the 1850s as the infant child of a Swedish bank embezzler on the lam.
In 1913, Lindbergh wrote Banking and Currency and the Money Trust, a tract denouncing Wall Street as “a man-made god that controls [America’s] social and industrial system.” Four years later, he produced Why is your Country At War?, an equally radical book arguing that America’s soldiers were fighting in support of a corrupt international financial order, and that Washington needed to take back the commanding heights of the U.S. economy from Wall Street’s clutches. The same year, Lindbergh brought articles of impeachment against members of the Federal Reserve Board, whom he accused of conspiring “to violate the Constitution and laws of the United States.” All this attracted the attention of U.S. Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer, who branded Why is your Country At War? seditious. In June 1918 federal agents raided Lindbergh’s Washington, D.C. printer, where they had the plates for the book destroyed.
Lindbergh père has lapsed into obscurity. (He died of brain cancer in 1924, three years before his more famous son, also named Charles, made his famous solo flight from Long Island to Paris.) But his story is worth dusting off: As University of California historian Kathryn Olmsted argued in her 2008 book Real Enemies, it contains a crucial lesson about the evolution of American conspiracism.
In 1913, when Lindbergh published Banking and Currency and the Money Trust, the federal government was tiny—with a budget of less than $1 billion. The FBI was smaller than the constabularies of many American towns, and largely confined itself to investigating prostitution. Its agents had neither the mandate nor manpower to police the nation’s political literature. Likewise, conspiracists like Lindbergh tended to be less fearful of Washington than of Wall Street, international financial speculators, and other nongovernment actors.
The massive expansion of government that took place during World War I changed perceptions on both sides. By 1918, the federal government suddenly controlled a budget worth almost $13 billion and a network of agencies charged with fighting political subversion. “In the process, these federal agents elevated Charles Lindbergh from harmless critic to Enemy of the State,” Olmsted writes. Lindbergh and other conspiracy theorists immediately returned the favor: “Some Americans had worried for decades that malign forces might take over the government. Now, with the birth of the modern state, they worried that the government itself might be the most dangerous force of all.”
A similar phenomenon was taking place across the Atlantic. Prior to the twentieth century, most European conspiracy theories focused on the plots of Freemasons, Illuminati, Jews and the like to seize power from society’s rightful aristocratic stewards. But in the radical conspiracist mythology of the Protocols, this changed: The evildoer was no longer the outsider, sneaking into villages under cover of darkness to poison wells and steal babies. He was now entrenched in the banks, the trading houses, the salons, the Masonic lodges, and all the rest of society’s nerve centers.
As discussed in the next chapter, Truthers take a similar view about the “neocon” cabal that gained influence in George W. Bush’s administration—a process of political infiltration that they claim began decades before 9/11.
Greed
Some historians consider it the greatest speech in the history of American politics. Certainly, it was among the most rapturously received. Audience members screamed and cheered “like one great burst of artillery,” wrote a journalist who covered the event. Others waved their arms in the air, flailing about “like demented things.” A day later, the man who’d thrilled the audience was nominated as the Democratic Party’s candidate for president. The year was 1896, and the burning populist issue on which William Jennings Bryan had staked his political fortune was . . . the free coinage of silver to gold at a conversion rate of 16 to 1. Strange as it may seem to modern readers, the word “bimetallism” then stood among populists for “hope” and “change” rolled into one.
On the surface, the debate was about monetary policy: The coinage of silver would have inflated the money supply, and thereby permitted indebted farmers and other rural businessmen to repay their loans on more advantageous terms. But the undercurrent was far broader: To Bryan and other bimetallists, the word gold was a stand-in for the upper classes—the fat land speculators, urban businessmen, and financiers who counted out their fortunes in the currency of bullion. Silver, on the other hand, was imagined to be the currency of the farmer, the miner, and the rural yeoman.
There was an international dimension as well: In Bryan’s conception, the gold standard was an English institution, and so America’s continued reliance on it symbolized a shameful, quasicolonial continuation of American subservience toward a European master. “It is the issue of 1776 over again,” he declared in his closing flourish on July 9, 1896 (according to a surviving copy). “Our ancestors, when but 3 million, had the courage to declare their political independence of every other nation upon earth. Shall we, their descendants, when we have grown to 70 million, declare that we are less independent than our forefathers? . . . We shall answer their demands for a gold standard by saying to them, you shall not press down upon the brow of labor this crown of thorns. You shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold.”
At the heart of Bryan’s vision is the standard rural populist’s division of the world between (in his words) “the farmer who goes forth in the morning and toils all day, begins in the spring and toils all summer, and by the application of brain and muscle to the natural resources of this country creates wealth”; and, on the other hand, the “financial magnates who in a backroom corner the money of the world.” But his special obsession with gold also captures an aspect of conspiracist thought that has remained timeless: the notion that evildoers’ plots revolve around a campaign to control some crucial substance.
In many cases, that substance is in our bodies. Hitler believed Jews were conspiring to pollute the Aryan bloodline; modern European conspiracists claim Israel is harvesting the internal organs of murdered Palestinians; in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Latin American conspiracy theorists alleged that Westerners were abducting local children to steal their innards for transplant. Many UFO buffs believe cosmic visitors have created a subterranean human-farming operation somewhere in the western United States so that they may harvest our vital fluids. Vaccine and AIDS conspiracy theorists imagine a global plot to contaminate us with infected blood. In most of these narratives, it is imagined that the evildoers have a special fondness for the life force of children. For instance, David Icke describes the secret plot hatched by humankind’s Reptilian overlords this way: “Humans have a particular type of energy, and the Reptilians have structured human society to trawl that energy, especially from children when it is at its most ‘pure.’ ”
From the nineteenth century onward, the hoarding of gold was an especially common theme in conspiracist tracts. References to the precious metal litter the Protocols, always in the context of the Jew as a greedy monopolist: “In our hands is the greatest power of our day—gold: In two days we can procure from our storehouses any quantity we may please.” By this period in history, the idea that a gold syndicate was behind the misfortune of farmers and laborers already had become a prominent theme in American conspiracist tracts, especially those authored by Greenbackers and free-silverites. A Populist manifesto circulated in 1895, a year before Bryan’s speech, declared that “[in] 1865–66, a conspiracy was entered into between the gold gamblers of Europe and America . . . Every device of treachery, every resource of statecraft, and every artifice known to the secret cabals of the international gold ring are being made use of to deal a blow to the prosperity of the people.” As late as 1934, amid the battle over silver remonentization in the United States, fascist radio host Charles Coughlin denounced (Jewish) Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau Jr., and sang the praises of silver, which, he claimed, was a more “gentile” substance.
Since the rise of the automobile, and the Teapot Dome Scandal of the early 1920s—an instance in which petro-conspirators truly did seek to secretly commandeer America’s ship of state—oil gradually has replaced gold as the mythical object of the conspirators’ obsessions; just as, more recently, “neocons” have replaced Jews, “bankers,” and “gamblers” as a description for the conspirators themselves. In the case of the 9/11 Truth movement, certainly, it is hard to find any conspiracy theorist who does not put oil smack at the center of his mythology.
“Although the apparent crisis is about terrorism, the real one is about energy scarcity,” career conspiracist Michael Ruppert wrote in Crossing the Rubicon: The Decline of the American Empire At The End of the Age of Oil. “In order to prevent the extinction of the human race [due to a lack of oil], the world’s population must be reduced by as many as four billion people. [This] constitute[s] the ultimate motives for the attacks of 9/11.”
Interestingly, the market crash of 2008, and the attendant rise of the price of precious metals, has led to a modest comeback for gold-based conspiracy theories. One widely circulated conspiracist email that began landing in my inbox in 2009 informed me that: “The biggest gold crime story of the century might be soon coming to full light. Evidence is accumulating that the Clinton administration . . . replaced perhaps the entire contents of the Fort Knox gold with tungsten bars plated by gold.” On conspiracist websites, such stories often appear side by side with advertisements from gold-coin wholesalers who, along with peddlers of wind-up radios and other survivalist gear, have carved out a profitable niche as conspiracism’s piggyback profiteers.
Moreover, gold does figure prominently in one significant “retro” strand of the Truth movement: In the original version of the influential Truther film Loose Change (described in Chapter 7), director Dylan Avery spends several minutes making the case that the destruction of WTC 2 may have been part of an elaborate plot to steal no less than $167 billion in gold using a “10-wheel truck.” The claim was removed from subsequent versions—after it was pointed out that $167 billion in gold, valued in Sept. 2001, would weigh more than 19,000 tons, thus requiring a fleet of about 485 semitrailer trucks.
Cui Bono?
As noted already, early conspiracy theories about the French Revolution focused in large part on the Illuminati, Freemasons, and anti-Catholics. It wasn’t till several years later that Jews were added to Abbé Augustin Barruel’s list of suspects, almost as an afterthought. What convinced many Frenchmen of Jewish involvement? The French National Assembly abolished special restrictions on Jews in 1791, and Napoleon Bonaparte convened a high-profile meeting of Jewish notables in Paris sixteen years later. Then, as now, conspiracy theorists acted on the logic of cui bono—“who benefits?”
The authors of the Protocols recited the logic of cui bono on every page, intertwining it with the related theme of insatiable Jewish greed: The Jews, it was imagined, would happily engineer any form of human tragedy to make a buck. Nazi propagandists applied this theme relentlessly in their propaganda. The 1943 Polish edition of the Protocols, for instance, depicted a fat Jew grasping two large bags of money as he sits atop a big pile of skulls.
In our own era, the logic of cui bono has been trotted out by conspiracists when Halliburton, Blackwater, or some other American conglomerate is awarded a contract in Iraq or Afghanistan. Assassination-related conspiracy theories, in particular, tend to emphasize the logic of cui bono—since the death of any public figure (JFK is a good example) always produces hundreds of indirect beneficiaries. Career conspiracy theorist and leading Truther Webster Tarpley, for instance, argues that the likely suspect behind the assassination attempt on Ronald Reagan was none other than “Freemason George Bush,” for whom “the vice presidency was not an end in itself, but merely another stage in the ascent towards the pinnacle of the federal bureaucracy, the White House.
“The Roman common sense of Lucius Annaeus Seneca (who had seen so many of Nero’s intrigues, and who would eventually fall victim to one of them) would have dictated that the person who would have profited most from Reagan’s death be scrutinized as the prime suspect,” Tarpley has explained. “That was obviously Bush, since Bush would have assumed the presidency if Reagan had succumbed to his wounds.”
Under the logic of cui bono, Truthers see today’s neocons—like the Jews of the Protocols—as both architects and profiteers of perpetual war. To quote John McMurtry, an influential Truther who teaches at the University of Guelph in Ontario:
One would be naive to think the Bush Jr. faction and its oil, military-industrial and Wall Street backers who had stolen an election with its man rated in office by the majority of Americans as poor on the economy . . . and more deplored by the rest of the world as a deep danger to the global environment and the international rule of law, do not benefit astronomically from this mass-kill explosion. If there was a wish-list, it is all granted by this numbing turn of events. Americans are diverted from a free-falling economy to attack another foreign Satan, while the Bush regime’s popularity climbs. The military, the CIA and every satellite armed security apparatus have more money and power than ever, and become as dominant as they can over civilians in ‘the whole new era’ already being declared by the White House. The anti-missile plan to rule the skies is now exonerated (if irrelevantly so), and Israel’s apartheid civil war is vindicated at the same time. Even the surgingly popular “anti world-trade” movement is now associated with foreign terrorists blowing up the World Trade Center . . . The more you review the connections and the sweeping lapse of security across so many co-ordinates, the more the lines point backwards.
Hypercompetence
In September 2001, the World Trade Centre was attacked allegedly by terrorists. I am not sure now that Muslim terrorists carried out these attacks. There is strong evidence that the attacks were staged. If they can make Avatar, they can make anything.
—Former Malaysian prime minister Mahathir Mohamad, January 2010
Of all the 9/11 conspiracy theories I’ve encountered, perhaps the most elaborate is that of Alexander Keewatin Dewdney, a retired Canadian mathematician who believes there were no Arab hijackers on September 11, 2001: The passengers of the four planes were killed using sarin gas, and the planes were flown into their targets by government-programmed computers.
Among the many inconvenient facts casting doubt on Dewdney’s thesis are the various telephone calls from passengers on the hijacked 9/11 aircraft to their loved ones. And so, Dewdney has made it his life’s work to prove that the people who originated these phone calls actually were actors and actresses pretending to be hijack victims. Dewdney has even gone up in rented aircraft with a bag full of cell phones so that he can prove to the world that the alleged phone calls never took place.
In his forty-page essay on the subject, “Ghost Riders In The Sky,” Dewdney describes how he thinks U.S. government agents stage-managed the desperate phone calls, in real time, on 9/11:
Imagine then an operations room (of which every intelligence agency has several) with a screen on which the events appear as text, keeping all operatives on the same page, so to speak. An operations director would have much the same role as a symphony conductor, cueing various operators as the script unfolds. An audio engineer would have several tapes already made in a sound studio. The tapes, which portray mumbled conferences among passengers or muffled struggles, replete with shouts and curses, can be played over any of the phone lines, as determined by the script, or simply fed as ambient sound into the control room. Trained operators with headsets make the actual calls. Each operator has studied tapes for several of the individuals, as recorded on prior occasions of Flight 93, as well as profiles of the individuals, including a great deal of personal information, some of it obtained ‘on the ground,’ as they say. As soon as the passenger lists become available, each operator scans his or her own copy, searching for the names that he or she will specialize in, discarding the rest. The introductory sentence, somewhat fuzzily transmitted, would carry the hook: ‘Honey, we’ve been hijacked!’ Thereafter, with the belief framework installed, a similar live voice could react to questions, literally playing the situation by ear, but being sure to include pertinent details such as ‘Arab-looking guys,’ ‘boxcutters,’ and all the rest. If the contact has been made successfully in the operator’s opinion, with the essential information conveyed, it is always possible to terminate the call more or less gracefully, depending on what portion of the script is under execution. ‘Okay. We’re going to do something. I’ll call you back.’ Click. Each operator has a voice that is somewhat similar to that of the person he or she is pretending to be. It is not particularly difficult to do this. For example, it is far easier to find someone with a voice that can be mistaken for mine (especially over a telephone line) than it is to find someone who looks like me (even in a blurred photograph). Moreover, most people can learn to mimic voices, an art well-illustrated by comedians who mimic well-known personalities. Operators would have received general instructions about what do to in the course of a call. Although each has been supplied with at least some ‘intimate’ details of the target’s life, there would be techniques in place for temporizing or for avoiding long conversations where basic lack of knowledge might threaten to become suddenly obvious, and so on. Three such techniques are praying (from text, if necessary), crying, or discussing the other attacks.
This fantasy encapsulates what Popular Mechanics editor James Meigs calls “the myth of hypercompetence.” Even as the conspiracy theorist imagines a world-controlling cabal that is subhuman in its lack of pity, morality, honesty, and empathy, he is simultaneously awestruck by their superhuman intelligence, ambition, guile, discipline, and singularity of purpose.
Given the evildoer’s massive intellect, it is imagined that he has access to—or seeks to perfect—doomsday machines and other science-fiction technologies worthy of Dr. No. Truther David Ray Griffin, for instance, warns readers in his many books that 9/11 is in fact a “Space Pearl Harbor” that somehow will lead to the weaponization of the cosmos. Prominent British Truther David Icke (a man widely quoted within the movement, notwithstanding his odd claims that the world is controlled by intergalactic lizards) believes the CIA has developed microchips so small that they can be injected into humans through hypodermic vaccine needles. Michael Ruppert writes at great length about an all-knowing, all-powerful U.S. government computer program called PROMIS: “Having inspired four new computer languages, [the software] had made possible the positioning of satellites so far out in space that they were untouchable. At the same time the progeny had improved video quality to the point where the same satellite could focus on a single human hair. The ultimate big picture. PROMIS progeny had also evolved to the point where neural pads could be attached to plugs in the back of the human head and thought could be translated into electrical impulses that would be equally capable of flying a plane or wire-transferring money . . . Data, such as satellite reconnaissance, could also now be downloaded from a satellite directly into a human brain. The evolution of the artificial intelligence had progressed to a point where animal behavior and thought were being decoded. Mechanical humans were being tested. Animals were being controlled by computer.”
During my years interviewing conspiracy theorists, I often felt like I was entering a science-fiction convention—a world of wide-eyed boy-men talking excitedly about remote-controlled jet airliners, paint-on explosives, undetectable electronic communications, and doomsday pathogens concocted in government weapons labs. Millions of conspiracy theorists—including Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez—even believe that the United States possesses “tectonic weapons” that can cause massive earthquakes, such as the one that struck Haiti in January 2010. Another popular theory is that the High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program (HAARP) ionospheric research facility in Gakona, Alaska, is a superweapon that can rain instant death (or, in the alternate view, control people’s minds) anywhere on earth. One correspondent even informed me that the 9/11 attacks were the work of time travelers: “A key whistleblower, Andrew D. Basiago, has emerged with evidence that secret U.S. time travel technologies were used as early as 1971 to acquire first-hand documentary knowledge about September 11, 2001—fully three decades before the horrific events of that fateful day. Mr. Basiago, a child participant in DARPA’s time travel program, Project Pegasus, has publicly stated how in 1971 he viewed moving images of the attack on the Twin Towers on September 11, 2001 that had been obtained from the future and brought back to the early 1970’s.”
This is one of the reasons why conspiracist movements tend to be so overwhelmingly male in their core membership. (Another is that the male mind tends to become more easily obsessed with abstract logic puzzles and eccentric ideological systems that are disconnected from the reality of day-to-day human existence—a subject to which I shall return in Chapter 5.) For all their pretensions to sophisticated truth-seeking, conspiracists often seem stuck in the suburban-basement universe of secret decoder rings and Star Wars action figures. As Meigs put it, many conspiracists have seen “too many movies”—particularly in the action genre. Like James Bond, freshly equipped at the beginning of each film with the latest gadgets from MI6’s weapons lab, the government agents of conspiracists’ imaginations have access to every sort of weapon ever invented—as well as many that are still imaginary. They possess Bond’s skill and savvy, as well. How else could they constantly avoid detection and capture?
The Protocols—which cast the Jews as full-fledged evil geniuses, far superior in intellect to their gentile victims—once more provides the perfect case study. But the evil superman is a staple of all forms of conspiracism. In the anti-Soviet mythology of Cold War America, he was imagined to be a sort of emotionally neutered robot—as I.F. Stone put it, “some supernatural breed of men, led by diabolic master minds in the distant Kremlin, engaged in a satanic conspiracy to take over the world and enslave mankind.” When the Cold War ended, the evil superman moved to Turtle Bay, and took up residence in the executive suites of the United Nations, where he developed the power to control fleets of undetectable black helicopters. “When the troops come in, they’ll come in such force it will be incredible,” Militia of Montana leader David Trochmann told journalist Michael Kelly back in 1995, near the height of the so-called patriot paramilitary militia movement. “In 48 hours, they can have one hundred million troops here. They’ll come out of the ground! They’ll come from submarines! They’ll come from air drops! They’ll come from everywhere.”
Covering Their Tracks
In the introduction to this book, I explained that my initial interest in the 9/11 Truth movement had an inward-looking aspect: Many of the conspiracy theorists I communicated with reminded me, in some way, of my own obsessional self. But there was another factor, too: Just about every conspiracy theorist I spoke with believed that my own industry—the corporate media—is deeply complicit with the government agents who destroy buildings and spread disease; that we know (or at least suspect) the awful truth, but refuse to report on it. Like all journalists, I regard myself as one of the good guys, as a force acting against unchecked government power. So why does my profession arouse such intense suspicion and hostility—not only among hard-core paranoiacs, but also among legitimate political activists spanning the political spectrum from left-wing student groups to right-wing Tea Partiers?
The fact is that there is a grain of truth to the claim that the media creates its own “invented reality” (to cite the words of influential Canadian Truther Barrie Zwicker)—just not in the way that conspiracy theorists believe. No, we aren’t privy to shocking, other-worldly state secrets: If we were, there would be a mad rush among my colleagues to publish them, become sainted stars on par with Bernstein and Woodward, and then sign seven-figure book deals. Rather, the reality we journalists “invent” is very much based on the mundane happenings in the world around us, but it is selected, packaged, and sold according to our own editorial and ideological biases, as well as our commercial understanding of what interests our readers, listeners, and viewers. As a result, the news that appears in the media often is dumbed down, sensationalized, slanted left or right in a way that can make people think we are making it all up out of whole cloth.
In the three-channel universe of the postwar years, the variance between corporate media sources was so small that most people could imagine that the reported world and the world they knew were one and the same. Now that media choice has expanded by several orders of magnitude; people can switch realities merely by changing the channel—including an option now known as “reality television.” In describing the day’s news, for instance, FOX and NPR provide such different points of view that they might as well be broadcasting from different planets. In the current political environment, the usual practice among ordinary media consumers is that they “trust” one side and accuse the other of dishonesty. On this score, conspiracy theorists distinguish themselves only by their even-handedness: They accuse all sides of lying.
Gregg Roberts describes himself as a freelance writer, business analyst, and lifelong peace activist. From the moment the Twin Towers collapsed, Roberts tells his readers, he was “surprised” by “the apparent completeness of the collapses, and the huge amount of dust that was produced.” In time, he came to conclude that the tragedy actually was the result of controlled demolition. “I spent the next couple of weeks appropriately depressed,” he reports. “I had known even before I knew all the facts that if the facts showed US officials were behind the attack, my life would never be the same. I would not be able to live my life in the same leisurely, typical American way. I would be compelled by my sense of integrity to try to do something about this attack, to try to bring the perpetrators to justice.”
But when Roberts tried to spread the message to his friends, he got a frustrating response. “In many personal discussions I have had about the issue, I am often interrupted long before I can describe much of the evidence, with the objection that such a large conspiracy could not have been covered up,” he writes. “[A] whisteblowing exposé would be published by a ‘reputable’ news outlet, the story would be picked up by other mainstream news organizations [and] widely known among Americans.” Why wasn’t any of this happening?
Finally, Roberts stumbled on the “chilling explanation”—that the media organizations we trust to give us the news are actually in cahoots with the military-industrial complex. “[Even] the Left media are largely controlled by elites tied to the very national security state that the Left media pretend to oppose,” Roberts writes, referring readers to a bewildering flowchart that includes entries for “George Soros,” “Skull & Bones,” and “Mother Jones.” “Even the venerable Left magazine The Nation seems to have significant ties to the Central Intelligence Agency.” In his lengthy 2006 essay, “Where are the 9/11 Whistleblowers?” Roberts concludes that the insiders who conspired to blow up the World Trade Center also were able to ensure that none of the conspirators would share their story with the outside world.
The idea that the 9/11 masterminds are sufficiently powerful to control the reporting of thousands of different American news outlets, as well as stifle after-the-fact disclosures from hundreds of active conspirators, is far-fetched. But it isn’t much more far-fetched than the notion that they could execute the 9/11 plot in the first place, which always is explained by reference to the evildoers’ allegedly superhuman powers of organization, discipline, and self-control.
A variation of Roberts’ argument is made within all conspiracy movements. Just as America’s early nineteenth-century anti-Masonic conspiracists claimed the Masons’ diabolical plots were being covered up by Masonic editors and newspaper owners, so do modern-day anti-Bilderberg conspiracists like Daniel Estulin claim that “Bilderberg meetings are never mentioned in the media, since the mainstream press is fully owned by the Bilderbergers.”
Likewise, in protocol twelve, the fake Herzl is made to go into minute detail about Jewish control of the media. “Our government,” he says, “will become proprietor of the majority of the journals. This will neutralize the injurious influence of the privately-owned press and will put us in possession of a tremendous influence upon the public mind . . . . If we give permits for ten journals, we shall ourselves found thirty, and so on in the same proportion.” At the same, Herzl provides elaborate instructions on how to concoct bogus rifts among newspapers and other publications, so as to convince the broad public that the marketplace of ideas is genuinely free. And if, by chance, some renegade journalist might try to spill the beans about the Jewish menace, he would be silenced with extortion: “Not one [journalist] is ever admitted to practice literature unless his whole past has some disgraceful sore or other . . . These sores would be immediately revealed.”
Since 9/11, the idea that the mainstream media is too corrupt and timid to report the real facts about the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks has become a cliché in Truther culture. “ ‘The news’ consumed by most people in North America and Europe is a cocoon of manufactured facts, distractions and personalities forming an almost seamless web of invented reality—including invented history—obscuring the power of money and other resources in the hands of the few, even while cleverly masking its own unreality,” wrote Barrie Zwicker in the influential 2006 Truther book Towers of Deception: The Media Cover-Up of 9/11. “Fake events are a key component of the illusion, a Truman Show writ large. The mainstream media remain mute in the face of mounting evidence that Western covert operators were behind Bali, Madrid, London 7/7, mosque bombings in Iraq and elsewhere and, of course, 9/11. Because the mainstream media are integral to the Industrial Military Academic Intelligence Media complex (IMAIM), the cold-blooded technicians of death face no journalistic scrutiny. Without moral, legal, technical or financial constraints, the black operators range freely, executing the orders of the global oligarchies—what I call the Invisible Government.”
One of the reasons that this book likely will do little to change the mind of anyone who is already a Truther is that I am a mainstream newspaper editor and columnist—which makes me a presumptive accomplice to government lies. Like the Protocols and so many other conspiracist and faith-based phenomena, the 9/11 Truth movement has embedded within its dogmas an airtight means for defending itself from outside critics.
And just like everything else, they borrowed the trick—without knowing it—from a cabal of plagiarist anti-Semites working for the Russian czar.