For the truth is that life on the face of it is a chaos in which one finds oneself lost. The individual suspects as much, but is terrified to encounter this frightening reality face to face, and so attempts to conceal it by drawing a curtain of fantasy over it, behind which he can make believe that everything is clear.
—Jose Ortega y Gasset
There are three infallible signs of the crank—that oddball, goofball sort of person who mutters, as he walks along, about how he’s grasped the key to everything. The first is that he has a theory about the Jews. The second is that he has a theory about money. And the third is that he has a theory about Shakespeare.
—Joseph Bottum
The first four chapters of this book focused largely on conspiracism as a historical phenomenon. Conspiracy theories, I’ve shown, are more likely to blossom when great tragedies or national traumas—the French Revolution, World War I, the assassination of JFK, 9/11, the 2008 financial crisis—rupture a society’s intellectual foundations, and shatter citizens’ faith in traditional authority figures. I have also described the three major influences on American conspiracism—apocalyptic religiosity, faith in small government, and the rapid onset of invasive technology; and described the structure of most popular conspiracy theories by reference to the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
But this big-picture approach tells us little about what motivates flesh-and-blood individuals to join conspiracist movements. Even in an intellectually traumatized society such as post-9/11 America, most people manage to resist the lure of conspiracism. This chapter will profile the characteristics of those who don’t.
Surprisingly little research has been done on the psychology of conspiracy theorists. The few, scattered academic papers there are on the subject tend to be free-form essays by intellectual dabblers in the fields of philosophy, psychology, and political science. Even the few social-sciences researchers who’ve systematically surveyed the views of conspiracy theorists generally have been unable to identify any universal causative factors: Among survey respondents, the only characteristic that strongly correlates with belief in any particular conspiracy theory is a belief in other conspiracy theories.
That’s because—as I’ve learned from my interviews—conspiracists tend to come to their beliefs for many different reasons. On a personal level, conspiracism is not so much a psychological ailment in and of itself as it is a symptom of a mind in flight from reality. That flight can be induced by any number of causes—including radical nationalism, tribalistic hatred, midlife ennui, narcissism, profound psychic trauma, spiritual longing, or even experimental drug use.
This chapter will offer readers a typology of the different varieties of conspiracist, along with sketches of a few typical specimens. In the next chapter, I will explain how and why their systems of belief often coalesce into something resembling a religious faith.
A wide range of conspiracy theories are represented in this material—from 9/11 Trutherism to ultraradical feminism to antivaccine activism. Some of the profiled theories are full-fledged conspiracist narratives in the tradition of the Protocols. Others are more limited in scope. But these details are of secondary importance: The organizing principle in this chapter is not the type of conspiracy theory being embraced, but rather the underlying psychological function that conspiracism performs for the affected individual.
The Midlife Crisis Case
Richard Gage: Truther Extraordinaire
After spending months taking in Truthers’ messianic fervor on the Internet in 2008, my first visits to their real-world conferences proved to be something of a let-down. Truth movement propaganda comes off as slick and impressive when it’s broadcast as web video, wherein arcane talking points can be packaged with glossy multimedia effects, ominous narration, and a catchy soundtrack. But once Truthers deploy to a real-world community center or academic lecture hall, the varnish of professionalism washes away, and the underlying crank conspiracism rises to the surface.
A typical 9/11 Truth event features about a half-dozen speakers. A local organizer or two will urge audience members to raise awareness in the community. Then a liberal arts professor or alternative journalist will lecture the audience about American state terrorism and neoimperialism. This might be followed by a speaker who focuses on some loosely related niche subject or other—media bias, Islamophobia, or Israel.
These speakers will attract polite applause. But they’re just warming up the crowd for the main attraction: the celebrity mega-Truther who’s been flown in to headline. These are the high priests of the 9/11 Truth movement—men (they’re almost always men) who’ve dedicated their lives to preaching the gospel at congregations across North America.
Unlike the warm-up acts, the headliner recites his speech entirely from memory. He’s given this talk dozens—perhaps hundreds—of times. The presentation is full of detailed references to airplane trajectories and chemical analyses. From experience, the headliner knows what buttons to push, what topics to emphasize and avoid, when to pause for laugh lines. When the time comes for Q&A, the headliner smoothly parries questions offered up by doubters in the audience (if any remain). As the event ends, fans cluster around him to continue the discussion. On their way out, they stop to buy a DVD copy of his lecture so they can share the Truth with friends and family.
Of all the Truther headliners I’ve seen, the very best is Richard Gage, a balding, mild-mannered, middle-aged architect who heads up a California-based group called Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth. I’ve heard Gage speak three times in three different cities. At each event, the response was rapturous. At a 2009 lecture in Montreal, his crowd sat mesmerized as he spoke for three straight hours—on a night when the Montreal Canadiens were contesting a playoff game, no less. At a speech in New York City a few months later, the audience burst into a spontaneous chant of “Ri-chard! Ri-chard!” Blushing and grinning like an earnest, overgrown schoolboy, Gage blurted out: “Your enthusiasm knocks my socks off!”
Truthers often are prone to rambling: Your average amateur might take the podium with an overflowing sheaf of Internet printouts, and cycle disjointedly through a half dozen sub-topics. Not Gage. His singular focus—laboriously examined in a six-hundred-slide PowerPoint presentation he trots out at every opportunity—is the precise sequence of events leading to the collapse of the World Trade Center buildings. Avoiding speculation on the Pentagon attacks and the machinations of the Bush White House is critical to the mission of Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth, he says. “We’re building and technical professionals,” Gage tells his audiences. “We’re not conspiracy theorists.”
Thanks to his bookish style and suit-and-tie wardrobe, Gage has become a unique property among Truthers: a quasi-respectable media pundit. In recent years, he’s been featured in mainstream documentaries, and spoken at the Commonwealth Club. Some local television stations have broadcast the film version of his slideshow Blueprint for Truth. Colorado Public Television (KBDI-TV/12) even featured it during a 2009 fundraising drive.
Gage inevitably elicits emotional gasps and shouts with his slideshow. In Montreal, a couple sitting behind me seemed particularly moved. “How can those murderers sleep at night after what they’ve done?” one exclaimed. (She wasn’t talking about al-Qaeda.) Even my own guest on that evening, a conservative-minded sixty-five-year-old woman, seemed transfixed, falling silent at points where I expected she’d be chortling and rolling her eyes.
In one particularly effective segment during his stump presentation, Gage puts up shots of the localized fires that broke out in the lower floors of WTC Building 7 hours before it collapsed. Seconds later, he shows footage of Beijing’s Mandarin Oriental hotel—which suffered an epic top-to-bottom conflagration in 2009, yet remained standing. It’s a cinematic juxtaposition that plays to the Truthers’ strongest card: Even many architects and structural engineers who’ve never heard of Richard Gage will concede that the collapse of WTC 7, a fairly typical 1980s-era structure located about a football field away from WTC 1, was unusual.
Before beginning his presentation in Montreal, Gage had polled the crowd on their views. Five people, including me and my guest, said they believed the “official theory” of 9/11. Ten others said they were “unsure.” Everyone else—about two hundred people—said they believed the WTC came down through “controlled demolition.” Once Gage had finished, he conducted a second poll. This time, when he asked how many people supported the “official theory,” mine was the only hand raised. Shocked, I cast a glance at the friend sitting beside me.
After three hours in a room with Richard Gage, she’d changed her vote to “not sure.”
A few months later, when I sat down with Gage at a Starbucks in the upscale bedroom community of Lafayette, California, I wasn’t sure what to expect. Gage is affable and disarming when surrounded by admirers. But like many cultish true believers, he can become emotionally erratic when his views are probed. At one point during our preceding email exchange, he’d interpreted one of my questions as an “indirect threat” on his life—and furiously threatened to cancel our interview.
But Gage arrived in a calm, friendly mood. After buying himself a soy latte, he sat with me on a bench outside the café for two hours, patiently describing his transformation from workaday commercial architect to 9/11 Truth evangelist.
It was in March 2006 that his life changed, Gage tells me. He was in his car just after lunch, fighting traffic en route to a construction meeting. Bored, he flipped on KPFA 94.1 FM, a listener-supported station out of Berkeley—“to hear what the communists were talking about.”
Up to that point in life, Gage recalls, he’d been just your average workaday architect, with a wife, child, and a strong Republican voting record. “I believed strongly in America,” he tells me. “I believed everything was okay. When Colin Powell was giving his Iraq evidence at the United Nations [in March 2003], I was cheering him on. I wanted us to go to war in Iraq. I wanted to find the WMD. I was completely on board. I was the poster child for George W. Bush’s foreign policy.”
But all that would change.
The voice he heard on KPFA’s airwaves belonged to David Ray Griffin, a retired Claremont School of Theology professor who’s since become a full-time 9/11 Truth activist. “Griffin was logical and methodical—almost grandfatherly,” Gage remembers. “He was talking about the 118 [World Trade Center] first-responders—information that had just come out in 2005—who said they’d heard explosions and flashes of light, beams dripping with molten metal, all amid the collapse of 80,000 tons of structural steel. It hit me like a two-by-four. How come I’d never heard of any of this? I was shocked. I had to pull my car to the side of the road to absorb it all. I knew I’d be late for the meeting. But I didn’t care.”
Within days, Gage was prosletyzing the Truth to everyone who would listen—his family, his friends, even his architectural colleagues at the Walnut Creek firm of Akol & Yoshii. He even began setting up booths at American Institute of Architects meetings, where he’d play video footage of the World Trade Center buildings coming down, and invite skeptical onlookers to sign his AE911Truth petition, which demands a “truly independent investigation” of the 9/11 attacks. Catcalls and mockery were common, Gage remembers—but he didn’t care.
In 2007, Gage cut back on his day job—designing the Summerlin Center Mall in Las Vegas—so that he could spend more time on his activism. Then, in 2008, the project went bankrupt amid the nosediving real estate market, and Gage suddenly was unemployed. Looking back, he says, it was a blessing in disguise: “Making money for large corporations like General Growth was a lot less fulfilling than bringing the truth to people.” Since then, he’s become a full-time Truther, just like Griffin, delivering 9/11 sermons at events across North America.
Gage will admit that he’s paid a price. Friends who failed to embrace his missionary zeal have drifted away. So has his wife, who he said had difficulty accepting his “dark” vision. Gage now lives by himself in a home office near Berkeley, paying his bills with the modest amounts he earns through donations.
Yet when Gage discusses all this, he seems curiously upbeat—almost euphoric—like a Benedictine monk who’s happily renounced the material encumbrances of secular life. Although he doesn’t talk much about his world before 9/11 Truth, he clearly remembers it as empty and unsatisfying.
“I would rather die speaking the truth than live in a police state, which is what 9/11 set the groundwork for,” he tells me in a final, slightly manic flourish. “I can’t have my son—or grandchildren—ask me, ‘What did you do to stop it?’—and I say, ‘I tried to talk to some architects but they wouldn’t listen.’
“I’ve never been happier. I feel blessed, in fact. This is my destiny, my mission. I’ve lost my career. I’ve lost my marriage. I’ve lost my house. But I’m working with patriots, spreading the truth about what’s happened to their country. What more could I ask?”
David Solway: Born-Again Culture Warrior
It was September 12, 2001, by the time David Solway learned that planes had hit the World Trade Center and Pentagon. At the time, the award-winning Canadian writer, then sixty years old, was on the tiny, picturesque Greek island of Tilos (population 350), finishing a book of poems, and watching the local birds circle over the island’s spectacular seascapes.
The next day, he walked into one of the island’s portside kafeneia for breakfast, and looked up at footage of the attacks on the café’s flickering television set. In an instant, he became a different man: “I spent the rest of the day wandering aimlessly about, sensing that the world had changed irrevocably and that there were no more enclaves of safety and recreation, no more ‘Greek islands’ where one could enjoy time out of time,” he later recollected. “I submitted myself, perhaps for the first time in my life, to a kind of Cartesian interrogation, a relentless scrutiny of the values and beliefs I accepted as gospel.”
Until that point in this life, Solway’s political attitudes had hewn faithfully to the left-wing cant expected of a man who makes his living with poetry. He was anti-American, anti-Israeli, antiglobalization. He read Chomsky with approval, railed against George W. Bush, expressed solidarity with the Palestinians, smoked pot, went to demonstrations, lived off government grants. As a young man, he’d even spent time at Berkeley with Mario Savio during the Free Speech Movement.
As the weeks passed, and the images of the World Trade Center flitted again and again through Solway’s brain, he became convinced that his leftist past had somehow made him complicit in what happened on Sept. 11. He felt ashamed, guilty, useless—overpowering feelings that, he says, “jarred me to the very foundations.”
After returning to Canada, Solway quit his job as a college teacher, put aside his poetry, and began work on manifestos against terrorism. His mortgage payments began to pile up. Lifelong literary friends began to drift away, estranged by the monomania of the erstwhile leftist. But Solway didn’t care. “I wouldn’t accept apostasy—even from a wife,” he told me as his wife silently slipped back and forth between the kitchen and living room, serving us coffee. “I would not accept her living a lie, refusing to uncover the truth. If you can’t do that, you’re not my friend.”
Inevitably, Solway’s search for the truth led him to the Internet. From the right-wing sites he surfed, and his own extensive study of Islamic theology, Solway became convinced that the enemy facing Western civilization wasn’t just al-Qaeda, but Islam itself. In our interview, he described the Koran as a “war manual,” and the Prophet Mohammed as a “master of hatred.”
What’s worse, the Islamists have a stooge on the inside—none other than the president of the United States. Over the last several years, Solway tells me, he’s been collecting a whole “closetful” of information about Barack Obama, all of it pointing to “world cataclysm.”
“I fear Obama more than I fear Mahmoud Ahmadinejad,” he says. “Obama is the one who’s going to let Iran go nuclear. It’s the same instinct that causes him to bow down to the Saudis, and shake hands with Hugo Chavez. His thinking is Far Left—very anti-Israeli. You can’t listen to Jeremiah Wright for twenty years and not be an anti-Semite. And do we even know where he was born? He hasn’t even released his school transcripts from Occidental College [in California]. Until proven otherwise, I believe the reason he won’t release those transcripts is because they’re marked with the fact that he’s a foreign student.
“I still haven’t seen a facsimile of his original birth certificate despite diligent searching for almost two years now and, in point of fact, no one else has,” he tells me. “Again, there is only hearsay about its existence—from a Hawaiian official, Robert Gibbs, and Obama himself, and a short form certificate of live birth with no specific information, which actually doesn’t count. Draw your own conclusions . . . We know next to nothing about this man’s inscrutable past, his academic records are under seal, his financial statements from his time as a senator are lacking, and even his Columbia thesis has gone missing . . . Deep down, we all know something’s terribly wrong, but we’re too afraid to risk ridicule and animadversion, or to be lumped in with conspiracy mongers and denounced as fruitcakes, so we steer our attention to other problems and issues involving this most disastrous of presidents, which is fine since there are so many of them. Myself, I don’t know for sure whether Obama is a ‘natural born American citizen’ or not, but I have my strong suspicions, which have yet to be allayed. And I’m not afraid to write about or air my doubts.”
These days, Solway spends his time in front of a computer, exchanging information about Obama with Birthers, and writing more essays about the Islamist threat. Once a poet whose name was known only to a few thousand literati, his articles now get tens of thousands of hits on websites such as FrontPage Magazine and Pajamas Media. While much of what he writes consists of stock anti-Islamist polemics, he also produces genuinely insightful flourishes that reveal his deep knowledge of literary culture, such as this gem from a FrontPage article, explaining why the Left is drawn to make common cause with Islamists: “The eloquent Imam, the jihadist [and] even the Palestinian gunman are only the latest incarnation of the [West’s] anthropological romance with the ‘pure primitive’ who redeems us from our own evolved complexities and etiolated belief-systems. The new aborigine, as the contemporary embodiment of the Noble Savage invented by European exploration, thus acts as the counterfoil to our own repressed and guilt-ridden civilization. The enemy who commands our sympathies becomes the heroicizing projection of our own bad conscience. Because he possesses what we lack and desire, we are willing to live in a state of contradiction and hasten to pardon his atrocities. Thus feminists will wink at the monstrous usage of infibrilation.”
As Solway ticks off the many corners of the world from which he gets fan mail, his tone is exhilarated, triumphant. His only regret, he tells me, is that he wasted all those years before waking up to the truth: “I’ve been a poet all my life. My first poem was published at the age of twelve. It’s all I ever wanted to be. But that’s changed. As Auden said, ‘Poetry makes nothing happen.’ ”
On the spectrum of geopolitics, Truther Richard Gage and quasi-Birther David Solway lie at opposite ends. The former views the war on terrorism as a fraud. The latter views it as the defining struggle of our time. But in their psychology, the two activists appear to have been set down the road of radical politics by the same psychological impulse.
To understand these two men is to understand the strangely sudden, strangely radicalizing effects that middle age can impose upon the male psyche. This is a time when life can lose its luster. The children grow up, the hair falls out, careers plateau, physical powers ebb. Amidst the resulting ennui, the prospect of overturning the familiar patterns of life and starting over from scratch seems tempting. Some men do this by joining an ashram, moving to Tuscany, or reuniting with childhood sweethearts. Gage and Solway have done it through conspiracism. In their new role as radical truth-seekers, they have an opportunity to reinvent themselves in front of a new audience of strangers who have little knowledge of their past lives, and who evaluate them entirely on the basis of their newly created identity.
Like all forms of midlife crisis, this sudden lurch into conspiracism offers middle-aged men a sense of revitalization and adventure. In some ways, in fact, it offers an even more complete escape than the proverbial mistress and sports car. For a middle-aged man who’s grown tired of life’s familiar patterns, conspiracism provides more than just fresh surroundings: It offers an entirely new reality.
The Failed Historian
Many things that do amount to tampering with the effects of logic do not in our field necessarily present themselves as dishonesty to the man who practices such tampering. He may be so fundamentally convinced of the truths of what he is standing for that he would rather die than give new weight to contradicting facts or pieces of analysis. The first thing a man will do for his ideals is lie.
—History of Economic Analysis, Joseph A. Schumpeter
A good starting point for understanding the psychology of conspiracism’s “failed historian” is Sigmund Freud. Not his theories, but his actual life: To the great embarrassment of many dedicated Freudians, it turns out that the founder of the psychoanalytic school of psychiatry spent years of his life pursuing the most durable and ambitious literary conspiracy theory of the twentieth century.
In 1898, Danish literary critic Georg Brandes published William Shakespeare, a book described as “perhaps the most authoritative work on Shakespeare, not principally intended for an English-speaking audience, which had been published in any country.” Like many Shakespeare scholars of the age, Brandes was interested in the connections between Shakespeare’s life and fiction. The creation of Hamlet, in particular, Brandes argued, grew out of Shakespeare’s grief for his own father’s passing in 1601.
As contemporary Shakespeare scholar James Shapiro has observed, Freud became fascinated by Brandes’ theory at a critical point in his life—his own father had died in 1896—and incorporated its claims into The Interpretation of Dreams, in which Freud argued that Hamlet “is rooted in the same soil as Oedipus Rex.”
“It can, of course, be only the poet’s own psychology with which we are confronted in Hamlet,” Freud concluded. “He was still mourning his loss, and [wrote the play] during a revival, as we may fairly assume, of his own childish feelings in respect of his father.”
In chapter 5 of his great work, Freud not only put forward Prince Hamlet as a foundational case study in his Oedpial theory, but wound into it an ambitious explanation for the protagonist’s hesitation in killing his uncle: “What is it, then, that inhibits him in accomplishing the task which his father’s ghost has laid upon him? Here the explanation offers itself that it is the peculiar nature of this task. Hamlet is able to do anything but take vengeance upon the man who did away with his father and has taken his father’s place with his mother—the man who shows him in realization the repressed desires of his own childhood . . . If anyone wishes to call Hamlet an hysterical subject I cannot but admit that this is the deduction to be drawn from my interpretation.” Over the next twenty years, the play would become a central part of the psychoanalytic canon.
Then, in 1919, tragedy struck: Brandes repudiated his theory about Hamlet, citing the discovery of marginal notes, by one of Shakespeare’s contemporaries, showing that the play actually had been written between early 1599 and early 1601—before Shakespeare père died in September 1601. In an instant, Freud’s elaborate claims about Hamlet went up in smoke. More than that, the revelation implicitly cast Oedipal theory itself into doubt: If Freud’s elaborate diagnosis of Prince Hamlet were this wildly off the mark, what did that say about the legions of flesh-and-blood patients who’d become convinced by Freud to trace their problems to similar intrafamilial causes?
Unless . . . and this was Freud’s unconscious taking the reins—unless Shakespeare’s life could somehow be altered in the eyes of history. Could it be that the man who wrote Hamlet somehow was other than the son of that Stratford-upon-Avon glover and borough ale taster?
As it happens, Freud seems to have dabbled casually in Shakespearean conspiracism since early days. But in the 1920s and 1930s—right up to his death in 1939—he became fixated on the emerging theory that Shakespeare’s plays and poems had been written by Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford—a spoiled, hysterical, and violent man who, as Freud later described him, “lost a beloved and admired father while he was still a boy and completely repudiated his mother, who contracted a new marriage very soon after her husband’s death.” What a coincidence.
Many of the writers who’ve pronounced the Bard of Avon a fraud (“anti-Stratfordians” is how they sometimes refer to themselves) expanded their theories into elaborate political narratives. Some nineteenth-century anti-Stratfordians, for instance, believed that the works attributed to Shakespeare were in fact coded manifestos written by a group of closet protorepublicans led by Francis Bacon as a means to undermine Elizabethan tyranny. In the most ambitious version of this fantasy, it is imagined that Shakespeare’s plays actually created the template for the United States Constitution—and that Bacon’s plot against the monarchy, had it succeeded, might have preempted the need for an American Revolution. Nevertheless, even the most far-fetched claims about the origins of Shakespeare’s writings do not fall into the classic Protocols-type conspiracy-theory template outlined in Chapter 2.
Even so, biographer Ernest Jones’ reflection that Freud’s theories about Shakespeare suggest a wish that “a certain part of reality could be changed” applies to the many conspiracists who fall into the category I call “failed historian.” For this group, conspiracy theories are a tool to eliminate the cognitive dissonance that arises when the course of human events doesn’t cooperate with the results demanded by their ideology.
Often, this type of conspiracism arises on the militant fringes of nationalist, religious, or identity-politics movements whose membership must explain away their failure to dominate their enemies, gain power and influence, or fulfill some ordained purpose embedded in their scripture or dogma. Radical Islam—with its obsessive focus on the Jews’ role in thwarting Allah’s will—supplies an example. So does Afrocentrism, a pseudohistorical movement that confers an expanded dignity on troubled African American communities through the conceit that they are heir to a black civilization that once created the guiding forms of Western culture.
(Afrocentrism itself is not a conspiracy theory per se—even though it is often wrapped up with ancillary theories that accuse white historians of conspiring to suppress the Afrocentric truth. But on street corners and disreputable websites, it sometimes can be found side by side with the teachings of Louis Farrakhan and his Nation of Islam, which are genuinely anti-Semitic and conspiracist—not to mention bizarre, in that they declare the white race to have been the creation of a mad scientist named Yakub 6,600 years ago. Yet this conspiracist strain in American black nationalism is rarely discussed in polite American society—much as we avert our eyes from the copies of the Protocols openly on display at black bookstores. Thanks to lingering guilt regarding America’s appalling treatment of blacks until relatively recently in the country’s history, there is an implicit assumption among whites that such conspiracism is more understandable, and perhaps even less reprehensible, than other varieties.)
Even in the case of conspiracists whose theories seemingly have little to do with any particular national or religious cause, I will discover during my interviews that their initial radicalization came through a specific geopolitical issue connected with their ethnic identity. This includes Serbian-Canadian conspiracist Lubo Zizakovic, the former football player profiled in the first chapter. While he now talks about the Bilderbergers and 9/11, his initial radicalization came during the Balkan conflicts of the 1990s, when the United States and its NATO allies took sides against the Serbs:
The demonization of the Serb people started with falsified images of a Serb-run Bosnian refugee camp that appeared on the front page of every paper in the world and on every television station as a Serb-run concentration death camp. In August 1992, millions of people were shocked to see photographs of a supposed Bosnian Serb “death camp.” Bush Sr, Clinton, and Blair used these images as justification for their involvement against the Serbs in Bosnia . . . The photos were produced by ITN, the British TV news giant, from footage shot by an ITN film crew which spent a long day in Bosnia. The film was shot in a refugee center in the town of Trnopolje. Most of the photographs featured a tall, emaciated man with a deformed chest, stripped to the waist, apparently imprisoned behind barbed wire. Do you remember those pictures? They were a hoax. They were the start of the ‘demonization’ of the Serb people . . . [In 1999] came the so-called ‘Racak Massacre.’ Clinton and NATO used this staged event as [an] excuse to bomb Serbia into the stone age . . . Racak was a hoax, but then again, so were the Serb death camps and everything else that came from NATO press briefings . . . it made no sense that nineteen of the world’s most powerful countries would gang up against such a small nation and bomb it for 78 days . . . Does the west care more for Kosovo Albanians that for Palestinians? Hardly. Let’s not start on what is happening in Africa as well. The war on Serbia was not about Kosovo Albanians, but geopolitical goals. The pillaging of the resources of the former Yugoslavia was continuing. Insuring a Caspian and Black Sea pipeline through Yugoslavia to the Adriatic Sea and robbing Yugoslavia of its natural resources for the benefit of large corporations seems to always be the overriding goal . . . My rage grew fierce as I heard friends and coworkers regurgitate NATO propaganda. Over 100,000 dead and millions displaced by the Serbs . . . I [now] have a deep distrust when it comes to the [mainstream media’s] reporting of international events.
The natural psychological alliance between conspiracism and radical identity politics is a phenomenon that George Orwell described in his landmark 1945 essay, “Notes on Nationalism.” While Orwell generally did not use the term “conspiracy theory” to describe this marriage, he did directly hit upon the manner by which ardent nationalists—a term he defined loosely to encompass political fanatics and religious bigots of every description—inevitably lapse into fantasy when history does not unfold as their parochial visions demand:
Every nationalist is haunted by the belief that the past can be altered. He spends part of his time in a fantasy world in which things happen as they should—in which, for example, the Spanish Armada was a success or the Russian Revolution was crushed in 1918—and he will transfer fragments of this world to the history books whenever possible . . . Events which it is felt ought not to have happened are left unmentioned and ultimately denied. In 1927 Chiang Kai Shek boiled hundreds of Communists alive, and yet within 10 years he had become one of the heroes of the Left. The re-alignment of world politics had brought him into the anti-Fascist camp, and so it was felt that the boiling of the Communists ‘didn’t count,’ or perhaps had not happened . . . When one considers the elaborate forgeries that have been committed in order to show that Trotsky did not play a valuable part in the Russian civil war, it is difficult to feel that the people responsible are merely lying. More probably, they feel that their own version was what happened in the sight of God, and that one is justified in rearranging the records accordingly . . . Some nationalists are not far from schizophrenia, living quite happily amid dreams of power and conquest which have no connection with the physical world.
Orwell’s analysis helps explain why conspiracism always finds its way into the mythology of totalitarian movements, such as in North Korea or Iran, whose bellicosity and brutal domestic policies can be justified only by recourse to the claim that they are guiding the nation on some infallible historical project. When history defeats this claim of infallibility, as it always does, every despot requires some version of the Ministry of Truth—so it can blame society’s problems on the schemes of an invented army of infidels and counterrevolutionaries.
In Nineteen Eighty-Four, Winston Smith goes about this intellectual project self-consciously as part of his professional duties as a clerk in the Ministry of Truth’s Records Department. But for the subjects of real-life totalitarian regimes, the process often arises subconsciously, as a crutch to make life endurable. “Among the Russian masses there was . . . a certain level of self-hypnosis about their Great Helmsman,” journalist Robert Fulford wrote in a column summarizing Orlando Figes’ 2007 book The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin’s Russia. “Figes introduces us to a man who grew up in a family of Soviet diplomats and believed all the Stalinist rhetoric about the necessity of imprisoning those who were ‘enemies of the people’—even though his father, his older sister, six of his uncles and an aunt were all arrested in the purges of the 1930s. But in 1944, when his mother was jailed, he began to question his faith. He decided that the secret police must have been penetrated by the ‘enemies of the people.’ ”
The psychological reflex that Orwell describes applies equally to sixties-era American leftists, who, as already noted, refused to believe that one of their own killed JFK; Japanese historians who have averted their eyes to the rape of Nanking (rightly described by Iris Chang as “the forgotten holocaust of World War II”); and Serbs—such as former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic—who airily declare the Srebrenica massacre to be “a myth.” Holocaust deniers are invariably failed historians. As Michael Shermer and Alex Grobman concluded in their authoritative 2000 book Denying History: Who Says The Holocaust Never Happened And Why Do They Say It?, these conspiracy theorists “find empowerment through the rehabilitation of those they admire and the denigration of those they perceive to be squelching their admiration. Many deniers seem to like the idea of a rigid, controlled, and powerful state. Some are fascinated with Nazism as a social/political organization and are impressed with the economic gains Germany made in the 1930s . . . The history of the Holocaust is a black eye for Nazism. Deny the veracity of the Holocaust, and Nazism begins to lose this stigma.”
Over the last decade, many Muslims followed this same pattern in regard to the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Minnesota-based Muslim convert Kevin Barrett, for instance, tells his Truther audiences that Osama bin Laden could never have been behind 9/11 because the al-Qaeda leader embodies his religion’s dedication to “peace and truth.” As described in Chapter 9, Barrett, like many other Muslim conspiracy theorists, identifies Jews and Zionists as the true perpetrators of the 9/11 plot. In this way, their conspiracy theory does double duty for psychological purposes: It absolves Islam of a terrible crime, while furthering the preferred narrative of murderous Israeli aggression. For related psycho-political reasons, many Muslims (including Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad) also have joined the ranks of Holocaust deniers: Since the international movement to create a Jewish state gained strength and urgency following Hitler’s extermination of six million Jews, it is imagined by militant anti-Semites that Israel’s raison-d’être can somehow be undone by rewriting history to Hitler’s advantage.
Many Westerners with no positive ethnic or religious attachments also fall into the failed historian category through their embrace of strident anti-Americanism. (As Orwell wrote in his essay, the nationalistic pathology “may work in a merely negative sense, against something or other and without the need for any positive object of loyalty.”) According to this brand of thinking, which has come to dominate large swathes of the Western intelligentsia over the last half-century, the great engine of evil in the world is American hegemony—and so every epic tragedy the world suffers must somehow be laid at Washington’s doorstep.
In this category, one finds antiwar and antinuclear activists of Cold War vintage, with political views steeped in the anti-American lore surrounding Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Vietnam, and the covert wars of Latin America. Their ideological heroes are Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn, whose fixation on American “state terrorism” encourages the notion that Washington is capable of boundless evil.
English professors, cultural-studies specialists, and modern-languages types are well represented in this conspiracist niche. So, too, are experts in “globalization studies”—such as Anthony J. Hall of the University of Lethbridge in Alberta, one of Canada’s most aggressive Truthers. One also tends to find a surprising number of poets (perhaps because their day jobs already require them to weave a self-invented reality from their own stream of consciousness). Rhyming conspiracists include British Columbia–based Truther Frank Moher, New York City’s Jerry Mazza (who delivers poetry readings at 9/11 anniversary events in New York City), and black nationalist Amiri Baraka (born LeRoi Jones), whose poem Somebody Blew Up America got him ejected from his job as New Jersey’s poet laureate:
Who the Devil on the real side
Who got rich from Armenian genocide . . .
Who own the oil
Who want more oil
Who told you what you think that later you find out a lie . . .
Who knew the bomb was gonna blow
Who know why the terrorists
Learned to fly in Florida, San Diego . . .
Who killed Malcolm, Kennedy & his Brother
Who killed Dr King, Who would want such a thing?
Are they linked to the murder of Lincoln? . . .
Who set the Reichstag Fire
Who knew the World Trade Center was gonna get bombed
Who told 4,000 Israeli workers at the Twin Towers
To stay home that day
Why did Sharon stay away?
Who, Who, Who
Unfortunately, Baraka is hardly an outlier within the field of black identity politics, which (for understandable historical reasons) comprises America’s most consistently fertile breeding ground for failed-historian conspiracism. Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, for instance, has suggested that the destruction of New Orleans’ levee system in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina was part of a plot to kill the city’s black population; and delivers speeches in which he blames the world’s problems on the “Jew Rothschild” (“Four things were set up in the year 1913: First, the Federal Reserve Bank, the IRS, the FBI, and the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai Brith. All were set up in the same year. Is that a coincidence, or is there a tie-in?”)
Following the financial crisis of late 2008, the failed historian began showing up in the form of shell-shocked free-market purists (often in Tea Party garb), who could not accept that the greatest recession of our time had been sparked by the recklessness of homeowners, overleveraged banks, greedy mortgage brokers, and other private actors. As discussed in the previous chapter, they have conquered their cognitive dissonance with the theory that the crisis actually was part of a secret plot hatched by Barack Obama and other liberals to destroy capitalism. This theory has become so common in Tea Party circles that it now goes by a commonly recognized shorthand—the “Cloward-Piven Strategy,” named after two 1960s-era left-wing Columbia University sociologists. (As with many of the conspiracy theories I have described in this book, there was a real grain of truth in this one: In their now-infamous 1966 article in The Nation, Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven truly did urge Americans to apply for welfare en masse so as to “produce bureaucratic disruption in welfare agencies and fiscal disruption in local and state governments”—with the ultimate goal being “to wipe out poverty by establishing a guaranteed annual income.” This tactic was said to be necessary because “even activists seem reluctant to call for national programs to eliminate poverty by the outright redistribution of income.”)
“The undeniable and shocking truth is that Barack Obama (perhaps purposefully, perhaps unknowingly) is actually following a carefully laid-out strategy for destroying the United States of America that was initially proposed and published by two socialist faculty members at Columbia University (an institution that Barack Obama attended from 1981–83),” declared Joseph Farah’s WorldNetDaily website in a September 2010 email blast. “According to the strategy, the American way of life, as we know it, must be destroyed and discredited because the American people will not accept statism until the present system is destroyed and discredited. And how does one go about destroying and discrediting the system? If you need an example, look no further than the so-called economic stimulus schemes that the Obama Administration and Congress have implemented.”
The Damaged Survivor
On April 2, 2008, World Autism Awareness Day, Larry King devoted his nightly CNN program to “Jenny McCarthy’s Autism Fight.” Anyone who’d followed the debate over the devastating neurological condition instantly knew what to expect from McCarthy that night: Since 2007, the former Playboy model had become the world’s most influential spout of autism misinformation.
Sure enough, a few minutes into the broadcast, McCarthy began telling King about the miraculous autism discoveries she had made on alternative health websites, which, she claimed, had allowed her own son to “recover” from the incurable condition. She also launched into familiar, discredited theories linking autism to vaccines:
McCARTHY: “Parent after parent after parent says I vaccinated my baby, they got a fever and then they stopped speaking and then became autistic.”
KING: “Is your link scientific or statistical?”
McCARTHY: “Well, I believe that parents’ anecdotal information is science-based information. And when the entire world is screaming the same thing—doctor, I came home. He had a fever. He stopped speaking and then he became autistic. I can’t—I can see if it was just one parent saying this. But when so many—and I speak to thousands of moms every weekend and they’re all standing up and saying the same thing. It’s time to start listening to that. That is science-based information. Parents’ [anecdotes] is science-based information.”
A whole book could be written about the conspiracy theories that traffic on “alternative medicine” websites. These include the idea (as already discussed) that water fluoridation is a plot to destroy our minds; that the contrails emitted by passenger aircraft contain exotic chemicals—“chemtrails”—designed to alter human behavior; that wi-fi computer signals are eroding our children’s brains; and that AIDS and other serious diseases were designed by the U.S. military for the purpose of culling the world’s population. But of all of these, the most durable and widespread is the notion that vaccines cause autism. This is in large part thanks to the advocacy of celebrity laypersons such as McCarthy and their media enablers at The Oprah Show and, until recently, Larry King Live. Since 1998, when the theory was first put forward in a (since debunked) study published in The Lancet medical journal, millions of parents across the Western world have avoided vaccinating their children, leaving them exposed to deadly, and entirely preventable, diseases such as measles, pertussis, and Hib influenza. A disproportionate number of the parents opting out of vaccinations are from wealthy areas of the country, such as Marin County in California, where McCarthy’s brand of quackery has gained a foothold among web-surfing soccer moms.
Vaccines typically are administered to small children in the first two years of life, at around the same time that the first behavioral symptoms of autism manifest themselves. Many doctors believe autism is a genetic disorder programmed into a child’s brain before birth. But parents cannot see their child’s genes. What they can see is the steel needle that penetrates their then-apparently-perfect bundle of joy, injecting a mysterious foreign substance that (according to strangers wearing white lab coats), prevents an as-yet hypothetical medical condition. When this experience is closely followed by a devastating diagnosis, a link is forged between the two experiences in the minds of many parents—a link that, as many will confess quite candidly, can never be shaken by science. “I know what happened to my son after he got his [measles, mumps and rubella] shot,” the mother of an autistic child told science writer Arthur Allen. “I have no doubt. There’s no way they’ll convince me that all these kids were not damaged by vaccines.”
The myth that vaccines cause autism permits emotionally vulnerable parents to blame politically accountable, human evildoers—the big pharmaceutical companies, and their apologists at the Food and Drug Administration—for a trauma that might otherwise be seen as a mere act of God. As religious martyrs and psychologists alike can attest, virtually any amount of suffering can be endured if the one enduring it feels it has a purpose. What I call “damaged-survivor” conspiracism emerges out of the mind’s subconscious understanding of this fact: It is a quest to situate one’s travails amid a meaningful struggle against some oppressive evil. The more oppressive the evil, the more meaningful the struggle.
Such myths provide another psychotherapeutic dividend, too: hope. The bogus vaccine-autism link is actually two conspiracy theories in one. Not only do McCarthy and her followers believe that the medical establishment is covering up evidence that its drugs are wrecking children’s brains; they also promote the piggyback conspiracy theory that vitamins and other natural remedies can be used to “heal” the damage done by vaccines, but that this cure is falsely discredited by the very same medical-establishment evildoers. McCarthy, for instance, promotes something called “chelation therapy,” which removes heavy metals from the body. Other parents have turned to more exotic remedies. As Allen reports: “In the homes of autistic children, it is not unusual to find cabinets filled with 40 different vitamins and supplements, along with casein-free, gluten-free foods, antibiotics, and other drugs and potions. Each is designed to fix an aspect of the ‘damage’ that vaccines or other ‘toxins’ caused.”
Many conspiracists I’ve met have themselves experienced a traumatic, life-threatening medical crisis that knocked them out of their normal mental orbit. Often, their stories follow the same pattern: Doctors tried to cure their condition with expensive drugs and painful surgical procedures—but failed. It was only once they’d turned to a “natural” cure—faith healing, homeopathy, Gerson Therapy, or some other kind of placebo-based remedy—that their condition was cured. In the aftermath of this experience, they become convinced that profit-obsessed pharmaceutical companies and the medical establishment more generally have been conspiring to prevent Americans from discovering the power of these natural cures. From their personal experience, they extrapolate to the notion that all of corporate America is engaged in active conspiracy against ordinary American citizens.
In fact, hostility toward conventional medicine is a popular theme in just about every modern conspiracist movement—including Scientology, UFO groups, and 9/11 Truth. Even right-wing conspiracy theorists, no enemies of the free market, tend to embrace herbal miracle-cures and other forms of quack medicine more commonly associated with the vegan Left.
During my interviews in the New York City area, I met a variety of Truthers who fell into the damaged-survivor category: emotionally traumatized parents, children, siblings, or spouses of 9/11 victims, including one genuinely pitiful middle-aged protestor who carries a sign featuring a picture of a handsome young man alongside the words “The NWO [New World Order] murdered my cousin Bradley Van Hoorn.”
Other Truthers in this category include some of the “Jersey Girls” whose activism helped spur the creation of the independent 9/11 Commission; Manny Badillo, a leading New York City-based Truther whose uncle and mentor, Joseph Sgroi, died on 9/11; and Bob McIlvane, a former Philadelphia schoolteacher who became a spokesmen for the Truth movement after losing a son in the North Tower.
Damaged survivors are particularly effective as recruiters for conspiracist movements because the spectacle of their grief short-circuits our intellectual faculties—much in the same way that graphic testimony from a crime victim can sway a jury to convict an innocent defendant. “When I saw Bob [McIlvane] cry at the commission hearings in New York in 2004, it broke my heart,” Pennsylvania-based 911blogger.com founder Jon Gold told me when I asked him what drove his activism. “The anger I felt when I saw we were lied to was enormous. I couldn’t imagine how much extra pain must have been felt by those who actually lost people. I believe they deserve better.”
All of which to say: It is not just because Jenny McCarthy is attractive and famous that she is permitted to promote nonsense medical theories on national television. It is also because she has experienced suffering, a subject that usually can be counted on to arouse the interest of American television viewers, even as it blunts their critical faculties.
In November of 2008, around the time Barack Obama was winning the White House, former Three’s Company star and Thighmaster pitchwoman Suzanne Somers awoke in a state of terror. She was covered in welts, and could barely breathe. By the time her husband had rushed her to the nearest emergency room, she was nearly dead.
When Somers recovered from this genuinely terrifying ordeal, doctors administered a CAT scan. The results were devastating. She’d survived an episode of breast cancer a few years before, and the disease apparently had returned with a vengeance, metastasizing throughout her innards. The tumors were literally too numerous to be counted. One doctor who saw the images told her flatly: “I’ve never seen so much cancer in my life.”
Somers was stunned. She’d done everything right—eaten nothing but natural foods and natural dietary supplements, avoided stress, exercised regularly. Two years before, she’d published a New York Times number one best seller about how to live a long, healthy life. She’d been tested by doctors just three months previous, and come out clean. “How could I have cancer?” she thought to herself.
In fact, Suzanne Somers didn’t have cancer. The images doctors saw on her CAT Scan apparently were the result of an exotic fever she’d contracted while working in her organic garden, possibly exacerbated by an alternative therapy to treat the effects of menopause.
One would imagine Somers being overjoyed by the news that she was cancer-free. But her dominant reaction was fury—not only at the doctors who’d misdiagnosed her, but at the Western medical establishment itself, which, she believes, is conspiring to destroy our health with chemotherapy and other “poisons.” Days later, when Somers was discharged from the hospital, one of the first things she did was throw out the medications she’d been prescribed by hospital doctors. Eventually, the whole experience would find its way into her 2009 alternative-medicine book, Knockout: Interviews With Doctors Who Are Curing Cancer.
Like McCarthy and other radicalized critics of modern medicine, Somers has come to view the human body in essentially medieval terms. According to this view—of which there are endless variations, each with its own cult following and mail-order industry—the human body is powered by a natural energy field that becomes compromised when exposed to artificial Western foods, medicines, and medical therapies. Vitamins, obscure extracts, oils, balms, herbs, and meditation are presumptively good. Prescription drugs, radiological treatments, and surgical interventions are presumptively bad. It is a distinction upon which Somers herself is willing to stake her life: She tells readers that, if again faced with a cancer diagnosis, “my choice overwhelmingly would be to use only alternative treatments.”
Knockout promotes a variety of dubious therapies—such as laetrile, an apricot extract that was proven ineffective decades ago; and “the Gonzalez protocol,” a bizarre regimen involving twice-daily coffee enemas. If only the medical establishment and the FDA took these treatments seriously, Somers argues, researchers would receive the funds needed to prove their effectiveness. Instead, the health care industry and its cynical government allies conspire behind closed doors to protect the cash cow of conventional cancer therapies. “Pharma is not interested in anything that comes from nature. Anything from nature cannot be patented,” Somers writes. “That is why so often many natural alternatives to serious diseases never see the light of day.”
Before dismissing Somers as a Hollywood know-nothing, it’s worth understanding her frame of mind, and how she came to it. The unfortunate fact is that a lot of her impressions about conventional, hospital-based health care practices ring true. The tests and treatments we receive for cancer and other serious ailments are painful and humiliating, just as she says. Often, they aren’t even necessary, but are carried out simply to satisfy the preprinted checklists set out by hospital managers and insurance companies. Many doctors are brusque and patronizing. As anyone who’s spent time with a cancer patient going through chemotherapy and radiation can attest, it’s also true that there is—in Somers’ words—a certain “hopelessness that accompanied so many of today’s approaches to health. Even when they worked, there seemed to be an undesired reaction to the body. Somehow, you weren’t the same person anymore; you became slowed down, aging faster, fragile.” Chemotherapy—which Somers describes, not inaccurately, as “poison therapy”—can be especially traumatic.
Somers’ mistake—the same one made by many alternative-medicine advocates—is to assume that something that feels artificial and degrading must somehow be harmful to our bodies; and, likewise, that something that feels natural and uplifting must somehow be beneficial. Obviously, every cancer patient in the world would prefer to be drinking vitamin cocktails at a California sweat lodge than lying under a CAT scanner. But that doesn’t mean the former treatment will help us live longer than the latter: The human body is a complex machine, and sometimes the treatments that help us most in the long run are the most excruciating—and even inhumane—in the short run.
Most people have difficulty dealing with random, purposeless suffering—whether it’s in the form of a great depression, a collapsing skyscraper or a chemo ward. As already discussed in this chapter, medical conspiracy theories of the Suzanne Somers/Jenny McCarthy variety ease our psychic torment in two ways. First, they provide a politically accountable villain. Second, they hold out the possibility of a healthy utopia once the villain’s malign influence has been exposed.
Best of all, we’re assured, all we need to find this utopia are the five senses: Central to the argument in Knockout and other alternative-health guidebooks is the idea that our own personal intuition about what is right for our bodies, not the scientific analysis provided by the medical establishment, should guide our health choices. Jenny McCarthy encapsulated this approach in 2010, when she airily dismissed a new Pediatrics study authoritatively debunking her theory that autism can be treated with special diets. “We [parents are] the ones seeing the real results. And until doctors start listening to our anecdotal evidence, which is, ‘This is working,’ it’s going to take so many more years for these kids to get better. Every parent will tell you something different that helped their child.”
Actually, doctors don’t dismiss “anecdotal evidence”: Every data point they collect in their double-blind research studies is, in a broad sense, an “anecdote” drawn from a particular patient, a particular family. Epidemiology is nothing more than the science of systematically collecting and categorizing this information, and using statistical methods to determine what causative factors, if any, are driving the studied variable. But of course, McCarthy and Somers don’t actually mean that we should be studying all anecdotes, or even a randomly selected cross-section of them. They mean we should be studying their anecdotes, and those supplied by the handpicked experts and friends who support their theories.
The outsized influence of these two women is not a new problem: Social critics have wrung their hands over “celebrity culture” for as long as celebrities have existed. But in recent decades, it gradually has been exacerbated by entirely unrelated cultural phenomena: the rise of the self-help movement, the popularization of psychotherapy, and the attendant notion that our own subjective feelings about life are not only worthy of study, but in fact comprise the key to happiness, and even to truth itself. If this principle rings true on our therapist’s couch, why shouldn’t it ring true in our doctor’s examining room? Both are in the “wellness” business, after all. According to this view, the medical theories of Jenny McCarthy are just as valid as any autism expert’s; the cancer expertise of Suzanne Somers as authoritative as any oncologist’s. More so, in fact, since these two women have lived the conditions they’re writing about, whereas most conventionally credentialed health researchers are merely reporting the results of second-hand information.
The currency of a celebrity health expert lies not in her credentials, but in her endlessly repeated tale of pain and redemption. This explains why McCarthy, in particular, remains such a popular guest on television talk shows. Oprah Winfrey has made a fetish of what might be called “redemption through suffering”—a doctrine that puts the subjectively felt experience of victimhood at the center of the human condition; and which, like political correctness, makes certain forms of “resistance” narratives immune from intellectual rebuttal. Her guest list over the years has contained a steady parade of female heroines who have overcome some great trial—medical tragedy, racism, childhood sex abuse—and have emerged from it with an inspiring message for ordinary people. This emotional rags-to-riches formula not only supplies compelling human-interest fodder for Oprah’s audience, it also satisfies our spiritual need to find meaning in our suffering (a need once satisfied by religion).
What makes all of this so maddening to public-health experts is that modern science supplies unprecedented tools for understanding what makes us sick and what doesn’t. In the case of autism, for instance, the search for answers has led to massive metastudies involving hundreds of thousands of children in North America, Europe, and Asia. All of these studies have shown us that vaccine usage has no significant effect on autism rates—yet millions of parents believe otherwise, with the result that some of their children will contract diseases our grandparents once believed had become a thing of the past.
The Cosmic Voyager
David Icke was almost forty years old when he learned his true calling. Earlier in life, the Leicester-born Englishman had been a professional soccer goalie for Coventry City and Hereford United, a presenter on the BBC, and a national spokesman for the British Green Party. But everything changed on a psychic’s couch in 1990. At the fateful moment, he remembers, he suddenly felt “something like a cobweb on my face,” and the psychic began getting visions of a “Chinese-looking” figure—a messenger from another dimension, Icke later determined—who had come to tell him that “he is a healer who is here to heal the Earth, and he will be world famous.” Then and there, Icke decided that he had been anointed a prophet.
Icke’s message is that humans live in a virtual-reality universe—“very well symbolized by the Matrix movie trilogy.” In 1991, he told a journalist that he was the “son of God”—but he insisted that the term was meant with no Christian connotation. “I used the term [to describe my relationship with] the Infinite Consciousness that is everything,” he wrote in his 2010 book, Human Race, Get Off Your Knees: The Lion Sleeps No More. “We are like droplets of water in an ocean of . . . awareness. We are ‘individual’ at one level of perception, but still part of the infinite whole. More than that, we are the infinite whole, just as a droplet is the ocean and the ocean is the droplet.”
Icke has written sixteen books, and most of them are full of meandering New Age rhapsodies such as this. But unlike ordinary gurus, Icke has wrapped his spiritual message into an ambitious conspiracy theory—one that weaves together the Illuminati, Jews (or “Rothschild Zionists,” as Icke prefers to call them), the Mossad and CIA (which be believes engineered 9/11), and the London School of Economics. The conspiracy is so enormous, he argues, that it transcends the human race: At the top of the pyramid sits an alien race of lizard-people who control the world by projecting their extradimensional identities onto handpicked world leaders such as Queen Elizabeth II and George W. Bush. “ ‘Modern man’ was manipulated genetically by the Reptilian ‘gods’ to be their slaves, and Homo sapiens were given the brain capacity and physical frame that could best serve the Reptilian[s] as administrators,” he writes in The Lion Sleeps No More. “[The Reptilian brain] acts like an enormous microchip, and locks us into their control system.”
Fortunately, hope is at hand: According to Icke, “Truth Vibrations” now are being emitted into the “Metaphysical Universe” from distant solar systems—which will help all of us “break down the energetic barriers and blocks and lift the veil on the illusions and secrets about self and the world.” Icke’s mission now, as he sees it, is to get all of us to “tune in” to these vibrations so we can rise up together against the lizard overlords.
Epitomized by men such as Icke and Ken Jenkins, the Northern California–based New Age film producer profiled in Chapter 3, the Cosmic Voyager is the hippy of conspiracist typology. In broad terms, he resembles what University of York cult expert Colin Campbell called a “seeker”—a spiritual omnivore perpetually spiraling out toward the margins of Western cultural and political life.
The Cosmic Voyager often will follow eccentric food regimens, dabble in Eastern religious doctrines, and exhibit a pronounced suspicion of conventional medicine. His conspiracism flows naturally from the instinctive sense that the world around us is not what it seems; and that we are all bound together by some kind of unseen natural life force that is being suppressed or degraded by the guardians of our materialistic society. For the Cosmic Voyager, conspiracism is a sort of spaceship ticket to another world—or even another dimension. Since his mythology is vague and labile, he acts as a sort of conspiratorial Zelig, popping up at everything from Truther conventions to quack autism websites.
Central to the Cosmic Voyager’s worldview is the fictional reconstruction of human history—often according to some foundational myth about an ancient, Edenic society whose inhabitants frolicked about blissfully, until some cataclysm or shadowy cabal dispersed them. In this spirit, Cosmic Voyagers usually become obsessed with Stonehenge, Mayan eschatology, the lost tribes of Israel, Dan Brown-esque Christian pseudohistory, Atlantis, the pyramids of Egypt, Easter Island, and other markers of a supposed master civilization. (Campbell dubbed this hodgepodge “the cultic milieu”—a world “of the occult and the magical, or spiritualism and psychic phenomena, of mysticism and new thought, of alien intelligences and lost civilizations, of faith healing and natural care.”) Like devout Christians awaiting the Messiah’s return, or Shiite Muslims awaiting the return of the twelfth Imam, Cosmic Voyagers imagine that this ur-civilization is not lost in the mists of time, but rather will reawaken and assert itself somehow, either to teach us its ancient wisdom, or (as in the film 2012) render apocalyptic judgment.
In many cases, the Cosmic Voyager will hybridize with other forms of conspiracy theories to form exotic ideological combinations. Ignatius Donnelly, the prototypical “crank” profiled in the next section, for instance, sometimes would veer into the Cosmic Voyager category when he rhapsodized about the lost civilization of Atlantis. Another notable specimen is failed-historian/cosmic voyager Ernst Zundel, a Holocaust denier who claimed—as one conspiracist website summarized it—“that Hitler and his last battalion had boarded submarines at the end of the war, escaped to Argentina, and then established a base for flying saucers in the hole leading to the inside of the Earth at the South Pole.” Zundel—a by-turns paranoid and affable fellow who happened to live across the street from me during the late 1990s, in the Toronto neighbourhood of Cabbagetown—also suggested “that the Nazis had originated as a separate race that had come from the inner-earth.”
Some radicalized feminists likewise have fused the Cosmic Voyager’s alternative-minded utopianism with conspiracist man-hatred. Central to this vision is the idea that early Paleolithic civilizations were “Goddess cultures,” in which men and women coexisted in egalitarian bliss, inspired by the kinder, gentler “gynocentric” fertility goddesses that predated (in the words of self-described “radical lesbian feminist” and influential Goddess-cult proponent Mary Daly) the “phallocracy, penocracy, jockocracy, cockocracy, call it whatever—patriarchy.” This hybridized form of conspiracism became further hybridized in the 1980s, when the Goddess cult was grafted on to crackpot interpretations of early Christian history, leading (most famously) to the Da Vinci Code notion that the Vatican has been engaged in a centuries-long cockocratic conspiracy to suppress the “sacred feminine” core of Jesus’ message (but more on that in the next chapter).
Many Cosmic Voyager conspiracists, such as Icke, are UFO obsessives, and interweave their belief in alien civilizations with their suspicion of our own (human) government in intricate ways. A central theme in many of these conspiracy theories is that America’s political leaders are in contact with space visitors, but that this fact has been hidden from the rest of us.
Lurid as these science-fiction fantasies may be, they dovetail with the Cosmic Voyager’s more general, overarching belief that the world we see is merely a fragment of some much deeper reality. Just as a conventional New Order conspiracy theorist sees Barack Obama and George W. Bush as puppets for some shadowy petro-industrial cabal, a UFO conspiracist sees mankind itself as a mere pawn in a giant galactic space opera.
The Clinical Conspiracist
Only a small minority of the Truthers I encountered seemed out-and-out insane. This should not be surprising: The 9/11 Truth movement is a socially constructed conspiracist phenomenon—cobbled together on the Internet from the contributions of thousands of different people. Genuinely insane paranoiacs usually cannot take part in this sort of collaborative effort because they are incapable of extended social interaction in any medium. And so, their paranoid fantasies tend to be highly personalized narratives of their own individual construction—typically involving spouses, relatives, landlords, and work colleagues.
When clinically insane individuals do take a prominent role in conspiracist movements, it typically is in the early stages, when they can work their own idiosyncratic notions into the movement’s foundational mythology. A famous example in this category is L. Ron Hubbard, who wove the “religion” of Scientology out of his own paranoid obsessions regarding psychiatrists, “suppressive persons,” and 75-million-year-old intergalactic ghosts. Another is Delia Bacon, the emotionally unglued (yet strangely influential) Connecticut Congregationalist who spent much of her life preaching the notion that William Shakespeare’s plays and poems actually had been written by Francis Bacon (no relation) and his friends—before she died in a lunatic asylum at the age of forty-eight. The Truther movement has included several similarly unhinged specimens—including British Truther David Shayler, a former MI5 officer-turned-peace activist who now believes that “no planes were involved in 9/11.” (He insists they were holograms.) In 2007, he came forward with the claim that he is “the messiah,” and possesses “the secret of eternal life.”
In some cases, the preoccupations of insane individuals have filtered into the wider conspiracist community, and have become part of its baseline lore. This includes the idea that government agents are continually monitoring our communications, and even, somehow, our private thoughts, with secret implants or with microchips inserted into our bloodstream—a fear sometimes observed in schizophrenics. And as noted previously, some conspiracy theorists support the notion that the government creates “doubles” (and even triples) of alleged murderers such as Lee Harvey Oswald and Mohammed Atta—a suspicion somewhat analogous to Capgras syndrome, whereby the afflicted imagine that family members have been replaced by doppelgängers. Echoes of the same phenomena can be found in the fringe Truther theory, championed by the aforementioned Alexander Dewdney and others, that the 9/11 hijacking “victims” who called their relatives in the minutes before their deaths were CIA actors.
The telltale indicator of genuine clinical insanity lies with the structure of the conspiracist narrative. Sane conspiracists subconsciously erect a rigid mental firewall that insulates their real day-to-day lives from the life-and-death implications of their fantasies: The resulting doublethink allows them to sleep at night and maintain productive, functional lives without succumbing to the dread fear that their government will punish their truth-seeking activism with murder. (Indeed, one of the great ironies of the Truth movement is that its activists typically hold their meetings in large, unsecured locations such as college auditoriums—even as they insist that government agents will stop at nothing to protect their conspiracy for world domination from discovery.) Truly disturbed conspiracy theorists, on the other hand, can’t sustain that firewall. They weave themselves into the fantasy, usually as both hero and target.
The best example I have come across is veteran conspiracy theorist Michael Ruppert, whose 2004 book, Crossing the Rubicon: The Decline of the American Empire at the End of the Age of Oil, likely ranks as the most influential Truther tome ever published. (Ruppert says it has sold more than one hundred thousand copies.) From a commercial perspective, his psychological state sits in a perfect sweet spot: He is psychologically balanced enough to write lucidly and command a following with his books, but also sufficiently delusional to imagine himself at the center of fantastic, Hollywood-style cloak-and-dagger narratives.
Ruppert’s descent into paranoia began in 1976, with a woman. At the time, Ruppert was a rookie LAPD narcotics detective with stellar performance evaluations and a bright future. Then, during an evening out at Brennan’s Bar in Marina del Ray, he met “Teddy,” and fell in love. After the two became engaged, the relationship soured, and Teddy headed east, to New Orleans. Unable to make phone contact, Ruppert hopped on a plane in romantic pursuit—and entered what he describes as a “Dantean” demimonde of James Bond intrigue, one he seems to inhabit to this day. “Arriving in New Orleans, I found her living in an apartment across the river from the Gretna. Equipped with a scrambler phone and night vision devices, and working from sealed communiqués delivered by naval and air force personnel from nearby Belle Chasse Naval Air Station, she was involved in something truly ugly. She was arranging for large quantities of weapons to be loaded onto ships leaving for Iran. The ships were owned by a company that is today a subsidiary of Halliburton—Brown and Root. She was working with Mafia associates of New Orleans Mafia boss Carlos Marcello to coordinate the movement of service boats that were bringing large quantities of heroin into the city. The boats arrived regularly at Marcello-controlled docks, unmolested by the New Orleans police she introduced me to. Through her I also met hard-hat drivers, military men, Brown and Root employees, former Green Berets, and CIA personnel . . . Disgusted and heartbroken at witnessing my fiancée and my government smuggling drugs, I ended the relationship.”
It’s hard to say whether any of this is true—or whether the entire episode wasn’t an extended psychotic delusion: After interviewing the man for two hours at his small, tidy Culver City, California, home, I’m still not sure. But it’s beyond question that the trauma of this romantic breakup turned this once up-and-coming law enforcement officer into a full-time paranoiac. Within two years of meeting “Teddy,” Ruppert checked himself into a psychiatric hospital, complaining about death threats. Soon thereafter, he left the LAPD, and began peddling different versions of his story—including the contention that the CIA tried to recruit him to protect its L.A.-area drug operations—to whatever credulous journalists would listen.
As noted previously, he jumped early and hard onto the Truther bandwagon following 9/11, touring college campuses on the West Coast as early as November 2001. In that early period, he developed key tenets of the movement’s mythology—such as the notion that the attacks were the brainchild of Dick Cheney, and that the planes were flown by remote control. He even claimed to have developed a source—a small-time criminal and con artist named Delmart Vreeland, a man that JFK conspiracy buffs might describe as the Rose Cheramie of 9/11 conspiracy mythology—who could prove foreknowledge of the 9/11 attacks.
Like Estulin and other megalomaniacal paranoiacs, Ruppert describes his life as a cycle of near-death experiences and epic triumphs. He’s been targeted by secret-service assassins several times, he says—most recently in Switzerland in 2003. While in “exile” in Hugo Chavez’s Venezuela a few years back, he claims to have been poisoned with a local drug called Burandenga (“picture a date-rape drug times fifty,” he tells me). He describes black helicopters circling overhead when he meets with other “insiders,” and claims that the government attacked the offices of his (now defunct) website, From the Wilderness, using “microwave weapons.” He also casually compares himself to Lenin, and claims that his investigations led to the resignation of Donald Rumsfeld.
The Crank
“Angry” is an adjective often used to describe the current state of American politics. But nothing in today’s Washington could possibly compare with a speech delivered to Congress in 1868 by Ignatius Donnelly, Republican congressman for Minnesota’s Second Congressional District. Rising before his peers to rebut charges of impropriety made against him by Illinois congressman Elihu Washburne, Donnelly fulminated thusly:
If anywhere on God’s earth, down in the mire of filth and nastiness, [Washburne] can pluck up anything that touches my honor, let it come. I shall meet it on its merits. I have gone through the entire catalogue; I have analyzed the contents of the gentleman’s foul stomach. I have dipped my hand into its gall; I have examined the half-digested fragments that I have found floating in the gastric juices; but if it is possible for the peristaltic actions of the gentleman from Illinois to bring up anything more loathsome, more disgusting than he has vomited over me [already], in God’s name, let it come . . . If there be in our midst one low, sordid, vulgar soul; one barren, mediocre intelligence; one heart callous to every kindly sentiment and every generous impulse, one tongue leprous with slander; one mouth which like unto a den of foul beast giving forth deadly odors; if there be one character which, while blotched and spotted all over, yet raves and rants and blackguards like a prostitute; if there be here one bold, bad, empty bellowing demagogue, it is the gentleman from Illinois.
Donnelly, who already had developed a reputation in Washington as a loose cannon, flamed out of national politics shortly thereafter. Yet the meltdown proved a blessing in disguise, for it allowed him to follow the calling for which he was ideally suited: crankdom.
Even during his career as a politician, Donnelly spent much of his time in the Library of Congress, devouring the contents stack by stack. After returning to his home in rural Minnesota, he became a bookworm full time, developing a particular interest in life under the ocean. Out of this obsession came his 490-page epic, Atlantis: The Antediluvian World, in which Donnelly instructed readers
That Atlantis was the region where man first rose from a state of barbarism to civilization; that it became, in the course of ages, a populous and mighty nation, from whose overflowings the shores of the Gulf of Mexico, the Mississippi River, the Amazon, the Pacific coast of South America, the Mediterranean, the west coast of Europe and Africa, the Baltic, the Black Sea, and the Caspian were populated by civilized nations; that It was the true antediluvian world, the Garden of Eden; that the gods and goddesses of the ancient Greeks, the Phoenicians, the Hindus, and the Scandinavians were simply the kings, queens and heroes of Atlantis; and the acts attributed to them in mythology, a confused recollection of real historical events; . . . that Atlantis perished in a terrible convulsion of nature, in which the whole island was submerged in the ocean, with nearly all its inhabitants; that a few persons escaped in ships and on rafts, and carried to the nations east and west tidings of the appalling catastrophe.
The book became a best seller, going through dozens of editions. (It remains in print to this day as a staple of New Age reading lists.) But Donnelly was just getting started. From his home in Minnesota, the “Prince of Cranks” (as he later was dubbed) followed up Atlantis with Ragnarok: Age of Fire and Gravel, which argued that Atlantis was destroyed by a passing comet, and that the contours of our earth were formed by a massive barrage of extraterrestrial gravel. Then came Caesar’s Column—the dystopic protoscience-fiction novel discussed in Chapter 1–which warned humanity about the catastrophic revolution that would come if America did not reform its political system. A few years later, he produced an arcane anti-Stratfordian manifesto called The Great Cryptogram, in which Donnelly tried to prove—by counting and multiplying the number of different kinds of words in Shakespeare’s plays—that Francis Bacon had encoded a secret cipher proving his authorship of the Bard’s entire oeuvre. By the time Donnelly died on New Year’s Day, 1901, in fact, he had put his stamp on just about every strain of conspiracism and crankdom that would emerge in the eleven decades following his death.
And yet, as you read through Donnelly’s life story—as told in Martin Ridge’s 1962 biography, Portrait of a Politician—it’s hard not to root for the man. He’s not exactly a likeable character (as Elihu Washburne might have attested). But he did have the quality then known as pluck—what today we would call chutzpah. “Donnelly genuinely believed he was a genius, and that, by applying his mental powers to any problem, no matter how tangled or intractable, and regardless of the established body of relevant scholarship or scientific tradition, he could solve it with a fresh look,” is how J. M. Tyree put it in a 2005 essay. “Congressman, master orator, pseudo-scientist, student of comparative mythology, crackpot geologist, futurist, amateur literary sleuth, bogus cryptologist, Donnelly did it all with a charmingly boundless energy and a voracious intellectual appetite.”
In his fearless commitment to truth-seeking (as he imagined it), Donnelly personified one of America’s defining intellectual traditions. America, it is important to remember, has always been a land of cranks. Just as capitalism and the industrial revolution set every yeoman free to build a better musket or mousetrap in his barn or basement, the American Enlightenment set loose a million eccentrics to sweep away the dogmas inherited from Europe, with each championing his own cobbled-together religious movement, political party, or civic group.
As a conspiracist, the crank’s defining feature is an acute, inveterately restless, furiously contrarian intelligence. Many cranks have an Asperger’s-like obsession with arithmetic, flowcharts, maps, and lengthy data lists. Like Donnelly, they are unable to take any expert’s word on even the most technical subject. The crank can be satisfied only once he has personally established the truth of his theories using nothing but primary sources and the rules of logic.
What drives cranks on an emotional level isn’t the substance of their theories: Many of the Truther cranks I’ve interviewed—including David Ray Griffin, Barrie Zwicker, and Paul Zarembka, all discussed in this book—treated the issue of 9/11 Truth in large part as a debating exercise, and seemed curiously detached from the profoundly disturbing implications that flow from their claims. What cranks truly crave is the exhilarating sense of independence, control, and superiority that come from declaring oneself a self-sufficient intellectual force. Conspiracism is a natural outlet for this craving since conspiracy theories always exist in opposition to some received truth that enjoys the blessing of experts, and because the associated claims are regarded as daring and controversial.
Cranks typically are intellectual workaholics—“independent researcher” is how they often refer to these activities—furiously endeavoring to master all of the specialized knowledge required to prove their theories from first principles. Over the years, their homes become transformed into archives, overrun with great stacks of research materials. Within conspiracy movements, they comprise the role of “back office,” churning out the tracts that less dedicated and energetic conspiracy theorists use as their source material. Cranks rarely are bigoted or hateful in their attitudes—but their penchant for fringe crusades sometimes draws them into movements that answer to these descriptives. (A textbook example is writer Joseph Sobran [1946–2010], who gained renown as a stylist and conservative thinker at the National Review under William F. Buckley Jr., but who slid into crankdom during the 1990s. In his final years, he became so thoroughly detached from reality that he saw nothing wrong with appearing at Holocaust-denier conferences alongside full-fledged anti-Semites.)
Social interactions with cranks usually are memorable. One of the oddest interviews I conducted for this book was with Barrie Zwicker, an amiable crank who became Canada’s leading 9/11 Truther in the aftermath of a long career as a mainstream journalist. When I spoke with him at his cluttered Toronto home, he announced that he would be interviewing me (about my nonbelief in Trutherdom) in parallel with my own questions. As we talked, he hit buttons on a chess clock to regulate our usage of time—making sure we each questioned the other for exactly the same number of minutes. For reasons that seem obvious to me from such experiences, there are no crank women, only crank men.
Typically, the crank is a math teacher, computer scientist, chess player, or investigative journalist—careers in which the mind is trained to tease complex patterns out of empirical data. Like Donnelly, many come to their crankdom in middle age, or at the end of their working lives, as they are casting about for some project to occupy their hyperactive brains. In some cases, cranks are high-functioning intellectuals frustrated by a menial profession (the most notorious example being the voluble taxi driver with a crank theory about every news item that comes across his radio).
Marshall McLuhan—the communications theorist who told us “the medium is the message”—was a classic crank: He spent much of his leisure time scanning the personals columns in Toronto newspapers, seeking out coded messages about the time and place for “black masses” where, he believed, the Masons and other secret societies would meet to hatch their conspiracies. McLuhan’s obsession with the Masons, politely ignored by most of the scholars who’ve analyzed his life and work, is described in Philip Marchand’s biography, The Medium and the Messenger. According to Marchand, McLuhan believed that the American Civil War had really been a feud between Masonry’s northern and southern branches; and—closer to home—that Masons “controlled book reviews in important periodicals.”
McLuhan’s obsession with book reviewers is telling, since many mainstream intellectuals get pushed into crankdom by the conviction that they are being unfairly ignored or disparaged by their peers. In the current age, liberal arts professors who have spent their careers laboring in fusty academic obscurity, in particular, find they are able to become instant YouTube superstars merely by adding some sensational twist on an established conspiracy movement—all without having to go through the lengthy, frustrating process of legitimate peer review.
“If you look at a lot of the leading characters in the [9/11 Truth]movement, they tend to be people who are smart but never really got to the top [in their field],” says James Bennett, one of the cocreators of the well-traveled anti-Truther blog Screw Loose Change. “Look at [former Brigham Young University physicist] Steven Jones. He had his brush with fame [in the mid-80s] with cold fusion. But it didn’t pan out. And it became a miniscandal in the scientific community. He almost accomplished something. But now he’s in the Truth movement. He’s lauded by thousands. He gives speeches. People talk about him in the same breath as Gandhi and Jesus.”
Even when the crank is ignored or shunned, he derives satisfaction from the sense that he possesses secret truths about the world that ordinary people are too cowardly to accept. “Throughout the fringe movements that I’ve seen—whether it’s the 9/11 Truth movement, or New Age theories, or Holocaust revisionism—the people tend to have something in common: They think they’re smarter than the average person,” says Phil Molé, a Chicago-based freelance writer and veteran debunker who investigated the 9/11 Truth movement for a 2006 article in Skeptic magazine. “And often they are smarter than the average person. They usually have some professional success under their belt. They’ve earned a degree. They think they’re entitled to interpret things the way they see it—that they can declare everyone else to be wrong. The fact they happen to be smart doesn’t deter them from conspiracy theories. Just the opposite: It enables them. It shields them in their own mind from criticism. They think that the reason these other people are criticizing them is, ‘They just don’t get it. They’re not as smart as I am. They don’t know the things I know.’
“In the 9/11 Truth movement, you see a lot of that. These are people who pride themselves on being well informed. They read lots of stuff—a lot of it is just regurgitated from other 9/11 Truth sites, but they do read something. They can tell you exactly where such and such a plane was on such and such a day, or what was going on in Afghanistan at such and such a time. It’s all isolated scraps of information, of course. But they pride themselves on having all these scattered facts in their brains. So they tell themselves, ‘Where do other people get off telling me that I’m wrong?’ ”
Truther-wise, the leading crank is the dean of 9/11 Truth authors, David Ray Griffin. To this day, Griffin is known as one of the world’s foremost experts in the field of Process Theology, a complex metaphysical discipline that defines God in relation to the exercise of free will. After retiring from the Claremont School of Theology in California, he filled his days by taking up conspiracism full time. His work ethic is legendary: When I visited him at his seaside California home in 2009, he told me that he sometimes spends fourteen-hour days on his research. (During our interview, he spoke to me for three hours straight—and seemed prepared to speak for hours more had I not gotten up to leave.) Since 2004, he has written no fewer than eleven books, in which he methodically examines virtually every minute of the 9/11 timeline—much as Donnelly examined every word of King Lear and Othello. The table of contents for his 2008 book 9/11 Contradictions: An Open Letter to Congress and the Press, for instance, includes these chapters:
1. How long did George Bush remain in the classroom?
2. When did Dick Cheney enter the underground bunker?
3. Was Cheney observed confirming a stand-down order?
4. Did Cheney observe the land-all-planes order?
5. When did Cheney issue shoot down authorization?
6. Where was General Richard Myers?
7. Where was Donald Rumsfeld?
8. Did Ted Olson receive calls from Barbara Olson?
9. When was the military alerted about Flight 11?
10. When was the military alerted about Flight 175?
11. When was the military alerted about Flight 77?
12. When was the military alerted about Flight 93?
13. Could the military have shot down Flight 93?
SUNY Buffalo economics professor Paul Zarembka takes an even more granular approach to his Truther research, dwelling at length on such arcane subjects as the price of individual airline stocks in the run-up to 9/11, and the tail numbers of the hijacked 9/11 aircraft, both of which he discusses at numbing length in his 2008 book The Hidden History of 9/11. To quote at random: “AA 11 is listed with tail number N334AA. Returning to BTS data, it had arrived into Boston from S.F. at 5:52 a.m. on 9–10 (as AA 198), judging from airborne time. While BTS data do not report arrival into Dulles (any time in September 2001) of an aircraft with tail number N644AA, airgames.bravehost.com ascertained that the FAA tail number N644AA is replaced in American Airlines reporting procedures by N5BPAA . . .”
Another (unusually young) 9/11 crank is Craig Ranke—a manic, elfin, endearingly odd thirtysomething software salesman who proudly introduced himself to me at a New York City Truth forum as the founder of an outfit called the 9/11 “Citizen Investigation Team.” At the time we met, he’d spent the last three years of his life investigating little else besides the flight path of American Airlines Flight 77, in hopes of proving that no plane ever hit the Pentagon. As with other cranks I’ve met, Ranke is certain that his narrow area of interest is the sardine-can key that will roll up the whole of the conspiracy.
It is an impulse that Donnelly and his fellow anti-Stratfordian cranks would have understood well. As I listened to Ranke recite his elaborate adventures crisscrossing the flight corridors of northern Virginia, it was difficult not to be reminded of Orville Ward Owen, a successful Detroit doctor who became so obsessed with Shakespearean conspiracism in the 1890s that he built a machine to “decode” Bacon’s secret messages—a device consisting of two garbage-can sized spools, onto which was mounted a thousand-foot-long canvas sheet containing all Bacon’s known works (including, of course, those attributed to William Shakespeare). Owen and his assistants would take a seat directly in front of the tautly mounted catalog of Bacon’s mind, and then spin the spools rapidly, making the canvas sheet whip around like the magnetic ribbon in an audio cassette. While staring intently at the sheet, they captured and recorded the various repeating words and phrases that jumped out of Bacon’s life work—and from this, cobbled together a six-volume opus called Sir Francis Bacon’s Cipher Story, which not only confirmed Owen’s theory that Bacon had written Shakespeare’s works—as well as those of Christopher Marlowe and a half-dozen other famous writers—but that Bacon was Queen Elizabeth’s son.
Sadly for Owen, the theory didn’t fly. Even in this, the late golden age of Baconian conspiracism, Owen’s “Cipher Wheel” was widely mocked. On his deathbed, in 1924, he warned a confidante to steer clear of Baconianism, “for you will only reap disappointment. When I discovered the Word Cipher, I had the largest practice of any physician in Detroit . . . Instead, [I] lost my fortune, ruined my health, and today am a bedridden almost penniless invalid.”
The Evangelical Doomsayer
In 2002, Megadeth founder and front man Dave Mustaine—regarded by many aficionados as the greatest heavy metal guitarist of all time—thought his music career was over. “I had fallen asleep on my [left] arm,” he later told an interviewer. “The circulation was cut off to the nerve on the inside of my left bicep. When the nerve lost circulation, it shrunk like a crunched up straw . . . The doctors said that I wasn’t going to play again. They said I would get 80 percent use of my arm back, but not 100 percent, and I was told that I was certainly never going to play the way I played before again.”
But the doctors were wrong. After months of physical therapy, Mustaine taught himself to play the guitar again. In 2004, he reformed Megadeth, and the band has been a going concern ever since.
Mustaine returned to music a new man. At one point during his recovery, he climbed a hill and beheld a faraway cross. “Looking up at [it], I said six simple words: ‘What have I got to lose?’ ” he later recalled. “Afterwards, my whole life has changed. It’s been hard, but I wouldn’t change it for anything. [I’d] rather go my whole life believing that there is a God and find out there isn’t than live my whole life thinking there isn’t a God and then find out, when I die, that there is.”
Some rockers who find Jesus migrate to the Christian-rock genre—which combines a conventional guitar-driven music style with pious lyrics that offer praise to God. Mustaine didn’t go down that path. But he did begin to infuse his Megadeth compositions with apocalyptic imagery drawn from the modern American Evangelical tradition. The result was the 2009 album Endgame, whose title he described this way: “As a Christian, I believe [the elites’ ‘end game’] is one-world government, one world currency . . . It’s part of the master plan. It’s what I believe. I [signed on] to that when I became Christian. I know that there’s going to be a cataclysmic ramping up of all of these things that we’re seeing right now. And it gets worse and it gets worse and we’re watching our country disintegrate right now . . . That’s what Endgame is all about. It’s about educating our fans.”
The album cover of Endgame (which is also the name of a 2007 film written by Mustaine’s friend, radio host Alex Jones) is a conspiracist masterpiece, combining an assortment of New World Order motifs in a single, vivid scene. Dominating the image is a legion of bald prisoners, their heads branded with government markings, marching to their doom down a narrow metal chute, which is formed by walls made up of FEMA coffins. “[We wanted it to be] like these Hebrews being marched through the Red Sea,” Mustaine explained. “And all the people that are in the Homeland Security jumpsuits with the bar code on their head—you know it doesn’t say in the Bible if the bar code is going to be going this way or if it’s going to be going that way, so we did some cool imagery . . . We made it look like a mohawk, but then when you zoom in on it, it’s actually their bar code.”
The album’s title track begins with a mock public-address announcement, declaring, “Attention! Attention! All citizens are ordered to report to their District detention centers! Do not return to your homes; do not contact anyone! Do not use any cellular or GPS devices! Surrender all weapons at once! Attention! This way to the camps!” And then come these lyrics:
I woke up in a black FEMA box
Darkness was all around me, in my coffin
My dreams are all nightmares anymore
And this is what I dream every night
The Leader of the New World Order, the President of the United States
Has declared anyone now residing inside the US of A
Without the [radio-frequency identification] chip, you’re just an illegal alien
An enemy combatant of America, welcome to the New World Order
This is the end of the road; this is the end of the line
This is the end of your life; this is the . . .
A society in a society, inside the fence life as you know it stops
They got their rules of conduct and we got ours
Be quick or be dead, you crumble up and die, the clock is
Ticking so slowly and so much can happen in an hour
I learned my lessons the hard way, every scar I earned
I had to bleed, inside the day yard
A system of controlled movement, like a giant ant farm
Any time is long time, now you’re not in charge of your time anymore
The Ex-President signed a secret bill that can
Land a legal US Citizen in jail and the
Patriot act stripped away our constitutional rights
They say a concentration camp just popped up, yeah, right!
Refuse the chip? Ha! Get persecuted and beat by the
Tyranny of mind control, for the mark of the beast
All rights removed, you’re punished, captured, and enslaved
Believe me when I say, “This is the Endgame!”
Like Joseph Farah, the Birther and WorldNetDaily editor profiled in the previous chapter, Mustaine epitomizes the conspiracist type I call the Evangelical Doomsayer. Conspiracism is attractive to the Doomsayer because it organizes all of the world’s menacing threats into one monolithic force—allowing him to reconcile the bewildering complexities of our secular world with the good-versus-evil narrative contained in the book of Revelation and other religious texts.
The prototypical Doomsayer is an Evangelical Christian who vigilantly scans the news for signs that the world is moving toward some final, apocalyptic confrontation between good and evil. Early American history is littered with Doomsayer cults founded on this practice. But over the course of the twentieth century, as described in Chapter 1, the Doomsaying tradition fused with secular New World Order conspiracy theories that predict America’s subjugation by a godless evil empire based in Moscow, London, Turtle Bay, or Tora Bora.
In many cases, the Evangelical Doomsayers I’ve met are not actually Evangelists, or even Christian: So saturated is American culture with the imagery of Christian eschatology that it has been widely co-opted by esoteric religious movements and cults such as Jonestown, the Nation of Islam, Garveyites, Rastafarians, Heaven’s Gate, and the Branch Davidians. As scholar James Alan Patterson has reported, the common denominator in all of these is not any particular conception of God or theology, but a fascination with “visions pertaining to endtime, imminent cataclysm, judgment, and redemption.”
Once you strip away their jargon, radicalized Marxists also can be classified as Evangelical Doomsayers. Clipped to its spiritual essentials, their view of society is one in which injustice upon injustice will be heaped upon the toiling classes until some final cataclysmic revolution against the capitalist oppressor will deliver a classless New Jerusalem, in which man himself will be transformed into a viceless, iron-willed slave to the revolution. A similar analysis applies to Marxism’s tier-mondiste offshoot, “decolonization,” which Frantz Fanon rhapsodically described in The Wretched of the Earth as “quite simply the substitution of one ‘species’ of mankind by another . . . the creation of new men.”
The Firebrand
Every radical political movement needs a street leader—someone with the self-confidence required to bark commands into a megaphone, and the charisma required to elicit compliance. For the New York City–area Truther movement, that man is Luke Rudkowski, a blond, baby-faced twenty-four-year-old Polish American construction worker who lives with his parents in Brooklyn’s working-class Bensonhurst neighborhood. At rallies, Rudkowski always dresses the part of Truther statesman—in a funeral director’s suit that he bought for two dollars at the Salvation Army. At Truther “street actions” on 9/11 anniversaries, he tends to affect a solemn, weary look—as if his knowledge about the New World Order weighs heavily on his shoulders.
It was April 2007 when Rudkowski made a name for himself in activist circles. At the time, he already was dabbling with the 9/11 Truth movement—but he was frustrated by its emphasis on low-key tactics. Rudkowski believed it would take something more than blog postings and church-basement lectures to rouse America from its ignorance. One day, by chance, he noticed a headline in one of his father’s Polish-language newspapers: Former national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski—Trilateral Commission cofounder, Council on Foreign Relations member, Bilderberger—was speaking on the Upper East Side. In an instant, Rudkowski realized what he had to do.
A few hours later, Rudkowski was in the crowd at the 92nd Street Y, activated camcorder in hand. After patiently waiting during Brzezinski’s presentation about the war on terrorism, he rose to his feet during the Q&A, and delivered this statement, captured for all to see on a widely circulated YouTube video:
Earlier on this year, you gave a speech to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee where you alluded to the fact that the Bush Administration may stage a terrorist attack to justify a military action against Iran. And then in your book, you also acknowledged the fact that a memo was uncovered where Bush and Blair discussed painting a U2 spy plane in U.N. colors so Saddam would shoot it down. Although you have argued that deceptions to the American people may be necessary in order to deal with these enemies, how are we to know how many other terrorist incidents have been state-sponsored false-flag incidents including the largest one—the attacks of 9/11? How do we know, how do the American people know that 9/11 wasn’t staged, wasn’t engineered by you, David Rockefeller, the Trilateral Commission, the CFR, and Bilderberg Group, sir?
As Rudkowski can be heard saying all this on the video, the crowd remains silent—until he gets to the end, when the radical gist of Rudkowski’s accusation dawns on everyone all at once, and the room erupts in boos. Rudkowski perseveres, but is reduced to shouting staccato barbs through the repeated pleas to “sit down and shut up”:
It’s a question. Answer my question. You sponsored al-Qaeda, sir. You are a criminal. You sponsored al-Qaeda. In 1979, you gave them money. That’s true. You are CFR. scum. You are CFR. and New World Order scum. You and David Rockefeller will never have a New World Order. National sovereignty will prevail. Answer my question. Answer my question . . .
At this point, event organizers approach Rudkowski and ask him to turn off his video camera. Instead, he starts screaming, “9/11 was an inside job! Mr. Brzezinski is responsible!” and, “Wake up, people!” Then he dashes for the exit, camera rolling, guards in pursuit. Only after putting a few blocks between himself and the Y does Rudkowski stop to catch his breath, turn the camera around, and triumphantly declare into the lens: “Yeah, Brzezinski—you got yours!” The YouTube clip ends with Rudkowski on the subway back to Brooklyn, removing his suit jacket and white shirt to reveal a T-shirt emblazoned with the slogan, “F**k the Federal Reserve.”
The next day, Rudkowski put his video from the Brzezinski confrontation on YouTube. Almost immediately, the link went viral. Accolades poured in from Truthers around the world, who were thrilled to see their theories get an airing—if only for a few seconds—at a respectable Manhattan speaking event. Admirers contacted Rudkowski, asking if they could be part of his next guerilla theater stunt.
Coalescing under the banner, “We Are Change,” Rudkowski and his followers began ambushing other alleged New World Order insiders at public events—including Rudy Giuliani, who then was making a run for the GOP presidential nomination. They also slipped into a subway car carrying New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg, and managed to hector him for a full sixteen minutes. Rudkowski got up during a pretaping of Stephen Colbert’s The Colbert Report and began speechifying about the Bilderberg Group—an episode that didn’t make it to the air, but, like everything else We Are Change does, was posted with much fanfare on YouTube. In their most ambitious stunt, group members secretly configured a public-address sound system in a Barnes & Noble bookstore the day before a scheduled appearance by Bill Clinton. While the former president signed books, the system was activated, causing a loud disembodied voice to announce that “9/11 was an inside job.”
In time, Rudkowski became a regular on Russian television news station RT (which often features conspiracy theorists), as well as Alex Jones’ popular Texas-based radio show. Some even have begun speaking of Rudkowski as Jones’ protégé—high praise in the world of right-wing conspiracism. And he has begun branching out from the Truth movement to other causes. In one widely circulated video from the 2009 G–20 Conference in Pittsburgh, for instance, Rudkowski, megaphone in hand, can be seen shouting slogans as he leads a pack of protestors being routed by an advancing line of police: “We are American citizens! This is not China. This is not Nazi Germany! We have freedom of assembly under the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States of America, and we shall uphold our rights as American citizens because we love this country, and we love national sovereignty! . . . U-S-A! U-S-A! U-S-A!”
Eventually, the Pittsburgh police arrested Rudkowski for disorderly conduct and threw him in jail for a night—an event that he played for pity on his web postings. Increasingly, Rudkowski presented himself to his followers as a sort of Truther martyr, destined to suffer until the New World Order had been overthrown. One Facebook status update for September 2009, for instance, read: “When a man goes in front of a wave of oppression, he is beat down, but it is his persistence and willingness to stand there, that motivates and inspires others to stand with him and in that creating a relentless force that cannot be beaten down nor stopped . . .” This was followed by: “I want to thank everyone for the love and support, I do this for you and all humanity,” and “Another long night[with] a lot to do . . . 4 a.m. now, been up since 7 a.m. yesterday. But I am thankful for the energy I get from your support because without [it], I wouldn’t be as strong as I am.” The follow-up comments from his admirers included, “You’re a hero for the republic,” “I fear if 9/11 truth is uncovered, the elite will stage something bigger to ‘shut you up,’ ” and “It takes courage to go against the grain, Luke. Keep up the good work!”
Conspiracists of the firebrand type are the easiest ones to spot, because they always are the noisiest. For the firebrand, conspiracism supplies an ideological pretext to strike shocking, militant political postures, and thereby satisfy his hunger for public attention. Most specimens of the type are in their late teens or early twenties, a time when the developing mind is most vulnerable to angry, totalizing ideologies.
In another age, the firebrand manifested himself as a communist or anarchist. But since those creeds now seem merely quaint—not shocking—he instinctively has migrated to more exotic beliefs.