What is madness? To have erroneous perceptions and to reason correctly from them.
—Voltaire
David Rockefeller owns several homes. So it is hard to say whether he was at his East Sixty-fifth Street double-wide Manhattan townhouse during the afternoon of September 10, 2009. But if he was, he would have seen a remarkable spectacle on the curbside below: A hundred young protestors wearing black T-shirts emblazoned with the words, “INVESTIGATE 9/11.” Their leader, a Brooklyn College student and full-time rabble-rouser named Luke Rudkowski was screaming at the man’s home: “You will never have a New World Order!”
Many Americans probably are unaware that the ninety-six-year-old Rockefeller is still alive (as of this writing)—much less that he is leading the fight to create a one-world government. But for Truthers, the Rockefeller family is an enduring obsession. David Rockefeller chaired the organization that initiated the creation of the World Trade Center in 1960, with backing from his late brother, Nelson, then-governor of New York. Since the Rockefeller family helped create the Twin Towers, the Truther theory goes, they must have given the green light for their destruction.
After lecturing the nonagenarian for a while, the group walked over to the Council on Foreign Relations building on East Sixty-eighth, whereupon they broke into alternating chants of “Down with the CFR!,” and then, apropos of nothing, “No vaccines! No vaccines!” At one point, the ringleaders screamed out to the CFR president, “Come out Richard Haass!” (He never complied.) Banners were unfurled, and passing motorists were invited to honk in support. Many of the protestors carried stacks of black-and-white leaflets titled “Ten Reasons For Starting A New 9/11 Investigation,” and enthusiastically handed them out to passersby.
Most people in the crowd were teenagers and twentysomethings. But there were a few older, eccentric types—including one memorable specimen in glasses and purple track pants. Several were holding “Ron Paul for President” and “End the Fed” signs, in tribute to the various enduring conspiracy theories about the Federal Reserve. (According to radio host Alex Jones, who is profiled later in this chapter, JFK was murdered because he tried to dismantle the Fed.) One neatly trimmed man in his thirties, who told me he was a professional graphic designer, had produced a slick-looking placard with the images of Adolf Hitler, Josef Stalin, and Barack Obama side by side, emblazoned with the words “It Begins With Hope & Change.”
Screaming the loudest was a short, tattooed, dreadlocked fellow named Craig Fitzgerald—a man described to me as a “32nd-degree Scottish Rite Mason.” Fitzgerald occasionally took breaks from slogan-chanting so that he could lecture fellow protestors about the Illuminati. “Hegel was possibly a member—it’s hard to be sure,” he told one. “But [Johann Gottlieb] Fichte—there’s no question. He was in the group. You have to do your research. A lot of the patterns and sequences we’re seeing now descend from Bavaria.”
Then it was up Fifth Avenue and on to Michael Bloomberg’s house on Seventy-ninth Street. Unfortunately, no one seemed quite sure where the place was. And so for a while we ended up milling about around the Ukrainian Institute of America, a beautiful French Gothic–style mansion on the south side of Seventy-ninth, passing out more leaflets to pedestrians. (Inside the Institute, confused Slavs looked out from behind curtains, wondering what exactly their countrymen had done to bring down the Twin Towers.)
Later on, the whole group would reconvene at a Flatiron-district bar called Slate for speeches, as well as a recitation of poetry dedicated to 9/11 first responders, written by a middle-aged fellow named Jerry Mazza:
How do you do this to them,
Lady of Liberty,
take theirs away, their freedom
to work and be again.
these giant people whose inner
steel melted finally from thermate
and poisons in the air,
the steel blown up in a cloud
that stole the sky and the streets.
As I sat there observing this surreal scene, nursing my beer, and scribbling down as many of Mazza’s earnest lyrics as I could, my mind gradually began to drift. I wondered, not for the first time: “How exactly did I end up here?”
Don’t Call Them “Nutbars”
My introduction to the 9/11 Truth movement came through an unlikely avenue: the staid world of Canadian politics.
In the run-up to Canada’s 2008 federal election, the center-left Liberal party (Canada’s version of the U.S. Democrats, or Labour in the UK) was low on money and staff. Fundraising efforts had been subpar. As a result, many candidates got their party’s blessing before receiving a thorough background check.
One of the grass-roots party members who slipped under the radar was Lesley Hughes, an earnest middle-aged mother and community activist running under the Liberal banner in the midwestern city of Winnipeg. Like most Liberals, Hughes was decidedly left of center on foreign policy issues. But as one local blogger discovered with a Google search, her views went beyond her party’s standard cant: A 2002 column she’d written for an obscure publication argued that sources known to her “suggest[ed] CIA foreknowledge and complicity of highly placed officials in the U.S. government around the attacks on the World Trade Center.”
She also wrote that “Israeli businesses, which had offices in the Towers, vacated the premises a week before the attacks, breaking their lease to do it,” suggested that the war in Afghanistan was part of a U.S. plot to seize natural gas and drugs, and cited reports to the effect that Osama bin Laden had been treated at an American hospital in Dubai.
Following the revelations, Hughes was turfed from her party. In the process, she became a sort of lightning rod and martyr for North America’s Truther movement—something I discovered when I wrote a brief blog entry on my newspaper’s website casually criticizing Hughes’ “nutbar” opinions. Within hours, my inbox was stuffed with comments from irate Truthers, slamming me for my naïveté.
Wrote one typical U.S.-based correspondent:
Let’s set aside name-calling, and dare to follow facts and evidence. I would prefer the scenario that Muslim extremists were responsible for attacks on my country. That would be easier on me. However, as an American, I have allowed the ‘military industrial complex’ as President Eisenhower warned of, to align agendas with the neo-cons . . . Any actual clear-minded research leaves one with the revelation that such an event could not possibly have been orchestrated, directed, and carried out exclusively by Al-CIAduh . . . Do your own research, and the conclusion cannot be avoided: The events of, and since, 9/11/2001 were and are the actions of a global coup d’état. Having the courage to follow the evidence wherever it leads is not easy. It requires facing an ugly situation and sharing the responsibility for correcting it. I salute Lesley Hughes for answering the call to duty.
Like most journalists with a public email address, I find a lot of conspiracy-mongering in my inbox every day—mostly from isolated paranoiacs raging against landlords, ex-spouses, and municipal politicians. Sometimes, they send me thick sheaves of legal documents, proving how this or that governmental agency had conspired for decades against them; or hand-typed screeds all in caps about such and such a minority group. From the micrographia scrawled around the margins of these documents, and often on the envelope itself, you can tell before reading a word that you are dealing with a damaged mind.
Moreover, this was 2008, a time when large swathes of the West were in the grip of what Charles Krauthammer described as Bush Derangement Syndrome—“the acute onset of paranoia in otherwise normal people in reaction to the policies, the presidency—nay—the very existence of George W. Bush.” As an editorial board member at a pro-American Canadian newspaper (one that had endorsed the invasion of Iraq, no less), I had grown inured to the many readers who accused me of being an apologist for a war criminal.
But the Truthers who contacted me were different. They were neither street corner paranoiacs nor standard-issue political partisans. Most were outwardly “normal,” articulate people who kept up with the news and held down office jobs—but who also happened to have become obsessively fixated on very particular, and very radical theories about the people running the U.S. government. My initial batch of correspondents included: a mechanical engineer working at a nuclear reactor, a Finnish IT expert, a doctor, an explosives specialist, the president of a financial corporation, and several university professors. One woman I corresponded with, Elizabeth Woodworth, was formerly the head librarian at the British Columbia Ministry of Health Library and had since devoted herself to becoming a “voluntary assistant” to David Ray Griffin, a superstar Truther who placed forty-first on the New Statesman’s 2009 list of the world’s most influential people (more on him later in the book).
These people, I learned, aren’t the loners of X-Files stereotype. Just the opposite: Like other dot-com-era conspiracists, Truthers have collaborated on the Internet to produce a dense mythology with a professional, even scholarly, gloss. And they know how to stay on message: Scrolling down through my incoming correspondence, I was struck by how faithfully Truthers hewed to the movement’s main talking points:
I’d long assumed that abnormal theories came from abnormal minds. But these people couldn’t be dismissed as freaks. Outwardly, in fact, they looked and sounded a lot like me. And when I look back at the genesis of this book, I think that was the crucial fact that drew me to them, and made me curious about what made them tick. Like many of the Truthers who emailed me, I, too, have a weakness for narrow, geeky pursuits—tabletop war games, chess problems, sports statistics, Internet flame wars. During a previous phase of my life, when I was pursuing my master’s degree in metallurgical engineering, I would often spend sixteen hours a day in front of a computer, writing a mathematical simulation that perhaps two dozen other people in the world would find useful.
In other words, I know what it is like to become enmeshed in all-consuming intellectual exercises that the people around you simply cannot understand—and perhaps even disdain. But for me, it was always a hobby or an academic pursuit—never a worldview or a political philosophy. This is the line these people had crossed. And I wanted to find out why.
At first, I didn’t take Lubo Zizakovic seriously.
In his lengthy email to me, the man claimed to be all sorts of things—a successful investment banker, a software entrepreneur, an award-winning business scholar who’d once shared a podium with George Bush Sr., a walk-on member of the University of Maryland basketball team, and, most memorably, a former defensive end with the New York Giants. When I reluctantly took Zizakovic up on his offer to meet for lunch at a sushi restaurant near my office, I expected to meet a confused man inhabiting a world of fantasy.
As soon as I walked into the restaurant, I knew otherwise. Lubo Zizakovic is six foot eight, trim as my wife’s yoga instructor, with hands as large as small desk fans. No surprise that such a specimen would be able to make a career on the gridiron.
Despite his intimidating appearance, Zizakovic is no goon. During our meal of raw fish, he put me at ease, describing his experiences in professional football, the state of the global economy, his volunteer work for the Special Olympics, and the joys of raising a family on his large rural estate. The accomplishments he described to me are real, as is his career as an investment banker. And by all appearances, he’s good at what he does.
But every once in a while, as he became animated about one point or another, I would see flashes of the 280-pound defensive end who drove opposing quarterbacks into the turf during the 1990s. Underneath his genteel, well-dressed investment banker exterior, Lubo Zizakovic harbors a lot of anger—anger that’s been his constant companion since the defining historical event of our time.
“I was at [an investment banking] training session at Bricket Wood just outside London [on 9/11],” he told me. “When a trainer came in to inform us of the first plane hitting [World Trade Center] 1, we all immediately reacted as if this were a curve ball being thrown at us as part of the training session. It was that outrageous.
“Once I realized that the attacks were for real, my first reaction was, ‘My God! How could a group pull this off with such efficiency? Three out of four direct hits? Four of four hijacked planes? Where was NORAD? Where were the air defense systems?’ I did my undergraduate work at the University of Maryland, so I spent a lot of time in the D.C. area, and I drove past the Pentagon often. I couldn’t imagine how someone could pull this off.”
In the days following 9/11, the Bush administration blamed al-Qaeda for the attacks, and even identified the nineteen hijackers who’d been on the four doomed airliners. But for Zizakovic—a man of Serbian ancestry whose distrust of the U.S. government became a fixation when NATO took sides against Slobodan Milosevic during the Balkan wars of the 1990s—the official explanation didn’t hold up. In fact, it only heightened his suspicions.
“The U.S. government apparently had it all figured out immediately,” he told me. “That was the first time I smelled a rat. [And] when the United States turned the entire world’s sympathy to extreme hatred in such a short time, I knew something was wrong. When they attacked Iraq under false pretenses and found no WMD, I knew in my heart that a bunch of guys living in caves in Afghanistan didn’t do 9/11.
“The clincher was listening to Bush say that Bin Laden might never be found. The U.S. military, with all of its modern satellite equipment and military might can find a needle in a haystack—but not a guy isolated in a single region? Common sense pointed to a cover-up early on, and I just had to spend some time finding concrete evidence . . . I [now] know beyond a shadow of a doubt that 9/11 was a criminal act executed by elements of the U.S. government—let’s call it the shadow government—against its own citizens.”
Michael Keefer epitomizes what most of us imagine when we hear someone described as “an academic.” Tall, thin, bearded, gray-haired, and mild-mannered, Keefer shares a large century-old brick house in Toronto’s West End with his wife, an acclaimed novelist. Bookshelves line the rooms, each crammed with classic texts accumulated over a four-decade career as a professor of English literature.
Bookish as he is, Keefer hails from a long line of fighters. His father—an elder in the Presbyterian Church—landed at Normandy. His grandfather was nearly killed at Gallipoli, and went on to serve in the Burma Corps during the Second World War. Keefer himself took a degree at Canada’s Royal Military College in the late 1960s. As we talk in his living room, he directs my gaze to a portrait of an especially fierce-looking Keefer over the mantelpiece. “That’s my double-great grandfather,” he says. “His father and uncle and grandmother were booted out of New Jersey after the American Revolution. The family eventually moved to the Niagara Peninsula.”
After graduation from RMC, Keefer became an officer in Canada’s naval reserve, and then earned a doctorate at Sussex University in England. His thesis, researched during five years spent poring over Renaissance texts in Latin and German, was about the ideological origins of the Faustus myth. In time, he became an authority on both William Shakespeare and Christopher Marlowe, and published an exhaustive article on the philosophy of René Descartes.
And yes, he is a Truther.
Something about Keefer’s personality had always lent itself to activism: Early in his career at Guelph University, he engaged in an unsuccessful four-year campaign to save a local heritage bridge from demolition. His awakening to more global causes began in the 1990s, when he organized fellow faculty members at Guelph in opposition to Canada’s participation in the first Gulf War and the sanctions regime that followed. “It seems clear to me that what [the allies] had done in 1991 [were] war crimes,” he told me. “Two UN guys resigned in protest over sanctions in Iraq—both denounced them as criminal. I was collecting information about stuff like that.”
“Starting in about 2002,” he tells me, “I’d begun noticing that computer security people were raising red flags over U.S. voting systems. On election night in 2004, I was carefully collecting exit-polling information from CNN. The next morning, I noticed that all of the key exit poll numbers had been changed overnight from what they’d been at midnight. They’d been changed to correspond to the final vote tally. I proved that the numbers had been fiddled, and published [my analysis] on the Internet. The piece had fourteen thousand hits within a week. My article basically argued that the 2004 election was stolen.”
As he continued to research the 2004 election, Keefer found more dots to connect—including what he describes as evidence that the crucial Ohio results were sent to the office of Michael Connell, a Karl Rove confidante, before being certified by Ohio’s Secretary of State. “Connell died in a plane crash in December [2008],” Keefer notes dryly. “It quite possibly was linked to the election shenanigans.”
Based on these investigations, Keefer became more convinced that nothing announced by the U.S. government was as it seemed—including the “official” account of the September 11, 2001, attacks.
In the years following 9/11, Keefer—who’d formerly stuck to the world of academic journals and faculty meetings—began to surf the web, forging contacts with other left-wing authors and theorists. He became particularly influenced by the work of Michel Chossudovsky, a radical critic of the United States and globalization.
Keefer’s theory of 9/11? “I concluded that a highly placed group within the U.S. government wanted to energize the U.S. public into support for a radical program of redrawing the map in the Middle East and Central Asia. And I think they felt the only way they could get support for this geopolitical program was through some kind of mighty shock to the U.S. psyche. These people—whoever they were—both organized the absence of the American air defenses and the destruction of the Word Trade Center towers.”
As our lengthy interview unfolded, Keefer began to detail his theory—as if supplying footnotes in one of his carefully researched academic papers on Renaissance-era philosophy: the timing of NORAD military training, suspicious plumes of smoke emanating from the North Tower, the behavioral oddities of 9/11 hijacker Mohammed Atta (“purported hijacker” is how Keefer describes him). All of this he recites calmly, methodically, authoritatively—as if what he was saying were not even controversial, let alone radical.
Then, suddenly, the conversation turned, and we found ourselves once more discussing Faustus, Descartes, and the frustrations of university politics. Within a few minutes, I’d half-forgotten that the brilliant scholar on the other side of my coffee cup imagined the U.S. government to be guilty of mass-murdering three thousand innocent people on a sunny morning in 2001.
When we parted ways, it was with a friendly handshake and a smile: Like most Truthers I’d met, he didn’t begrudge the fact that I rejected his views. He was pleased that I’d taken the time to listen to him, and hoped that I’d eventually come around to the capital-T Truth.
Keefer and Zizakovic are just two of many conspiracy theorists I’ve met. I’ve chosen to include them in the first chapter because they exemplify the penetration of conspiracism into the well-educated middle class. Zizakovic is a respected and successful banker responsible for multimillion-dollar investment decisions. Keefer is an eminent author and university professor who is entrusted with the education of hundreds of young minds. Neither fit the stereotype of the antisocial conspiracy theorist scribbling out his obscure theses in a dingy student apartment.
They are alike in another way, too: For Keefer and Zizakovic, as for most Truthers, 9/11 is just the tip of the iceberg—a symptom of a far larger metaconspiracy organized by the world’s secret elites.
In interview after interview, a conversation about 9/11 would inevitably come back to the same group of apparently disconnected individuals and corporations—Henry Kissinger, the Carlyle Group, David Rockefeller, the Rothschilds, George Soros (who seems to be considered, by Glenn Beck and others, a sort of honorary Rothschild in modern conspiracist lore), Unocal, Halliburton, the Bilderberg Group, the U.S. Federal Reserve, the Council on Foreign Relations, the International Monetary Fund, Dick Cheney, the CIA, the Mossad, Pakistan’s ISI, Adnan Khashoggi, E. Howard Hunt, Zbigniew Brzezinski—along with theories linking them in complex and tantalizing ways. In the mind of the committed conspiracist, such theories multiply until they encompass literally every aspect of human life, from the water we drink (filled with fluoride, a “deadly neurotoxin” developed by the Nazis to “pacify concentration camp prisoners”), to the air we breathe (polluted by government-engineered “chemtrails” emitted by jet engines as they pass overhead), to the blood pumping through our veins (poisoned by government-mandated vaccines).
Keefer, for instance, suspects that 9/11 is but one chapter in a continuing saga of “false flag” operations hatched by elements within, or allied to, the United States government—including the bombing of the Bologna train station in 1980. He also believes there is evidence that “the occupation of Afghanistan is linked to U.S. government participation in the global drug trade”—an echo of 1980s-era charges that the CIA was trafficking cocaine in Central America as part of its campaign against Nicaragua’s Sandinista regime.
When you talk to a conspiracy theorist, you can never be sure where your conversation will end up. One of the very first Truthers I met—a charming, New York–based former newspaper columnist named Dallas Hansen, who’d lost his job as a result of his controversial views about the World Trade Center attacks—connected September 11 to a range of particularly jaw-dropping theories, spanning the assassination of JFK to the likely target of the next false-flag terrorist attack.
“My great-grandfather owned a bus line in Holland and hid Jews in his country home,” he tells me. “My grandfather was a teenager who participated in ambushes of Nazi supply trucks . . . I’m not the first person to compare 9/11 to the Reichstag Fire, nor to notice a sort of fascism-lite has emerged. The news abounds with tales of police-state tyranny, from [people] being Tasered to death . . . to police forcibly withdrawing blood from ‘drunk driving suspects.’ ”
Most memorably, he speculated that George W. Bush would retire to Paraguay so that he could enjoy the protection and fraternity of former Nazis. “Why in the world would he do that?” I asked. He responded that the fortunes of the Bush family have long been intertwined with those of the Nazis—and then described financial links between George Bush’s ancestors and Hitler’s regime.
(To my shock, I later found that Hansen’s story had a germ of truth: A 2004 article in Britain’s Guardian newspaper reported that “George Bush’s grandfather, the late U.S. senator Prescott Bush, was a director and shareholder of companies that profited from their involvement with the financial backers of Nazi Germany.” It was a classic example of an isolated historical factoid being used to justify an outlandish conspiracy theory—a pattern I would see repeated many times.)
As explained in more detail in Chapter 2, several common threads run through these theories, and they spooled over one another repeatedly during the course of my interviews. These include the belief that the path of history is controlled in secret by a small group of influential, fantastically wealthy people; that this power structure is murderous and morally corrupt; and that the political world we inhabit is fundamentally illusory, like the constructed reality in the 1999 film The Matrix.
“The world is ruled by an elite who make world events occur for their own benefit,” declared Zizakovic when I asked him to describe how 9/11 figured in the sweep of modern history. “Read The True Story of the Bilderberg Group by Daniel Estulin [an influential conspiracist book summarized in the next chaper]. In 1954, the ruling elite started coordinating their efforts. They are a global shadow government with influence and control of just about every major government in the world . . . Their objective, which can be argued might already be achieved, is a one government world with one currency where the masses have no real wealth and all of the resources are in [the elite’s] hands.”
When a conspiracy theorist held forth in this way, I would usually just put down my pen and listen as we dove together down the rabbit hole. There’s nothing else to be done: These metanarratives are so elaborate and ambitious that they essentially describe alternate moral universes—unrecognizable realms in which a Western government smashing airplanes into its own cities makes perfect sense.
Truthers’ arcane, detailed theories about internal demolition, NORAD complicity, and CIA–al-Qaeda complicity aren’t just paranoid fairy tales—they are foundational narratives in the construction of this alternate reality, told and retold at Truther gatherings in the same ritualized manner that psalms or Torah portions are read out at religious services. Like other radicalized political movements of our time, the Truth movement transcends activism: For many adherents, it has become the dominant spiritual force in their lives, a pattern described in detail in Chapter 6.
Certainly, the 9/11 Truth phenomenon cannot be explained as a merely political phenomenon. While I once supposed Truthers to be simply radical specimens of the anti-American, Bush-hating Left, many of the Truthers I’ve met actually turned out to be self-described conservatives who see 9/11 as part of a plot to strip Americans of their liberty, and transfer Washington’s sovereign powers to the United Nations. With the liberal Barack Obama in power, this imagined day of reckoning only grows nearer.
For Alex Jones, it all started with David Koresh and the Waco siege.
Jones grew up in the Dallas suburbs, just two hours’ drive from the Branch Davidian ranch at Mount Carmel. In 1993, when Jones was barely out of high school, a seven-week Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF) siege ended in the incineration of seventy-six cult members. He remembers being transfixed by the congressional hearings into the fiasco, which were broadcast by C-SPAN. The episode turned Jones into a full-time crusader against the United States government.
Koresh and his followers, Jones believed, were harmless innocents who’d been murdered by Attorney General Janet Reno and cynical ATF agents looking to boost their agency’s profile. “I remember watching the TV screen and seeing that famous footage of the ATF loading their video cameras before going in,” Jones told me. “They were going to lose their funding. This was [a] PR stunt. They were about to be abolished. That’s why they did it.”
Two years later, Timothy McVeigh bombed the Alfred P. Murrah building in Oklahoma City, an act intended to incite a popular revolt against the U.S. government. But Jones concluded the bombing actually was a part of a conspiracy, hatched by the feds themselves, to quash the nascent states’-rights movement. By this time, his opinion mattered: The twenty-one-year-old Jones already had his own cable-access television program. A year later, he began airing on radio. By the time George W. Bush was in his second term he arguably had become the most popular and influential conspiracist in America. His syndicated Alex Jones Show appears on dozens of AM, FM, and shortwave stations across the United States—a platform that gives him unparalleled influence within the Truther movement.
Jones believes that the 9/11 plot was an inside job, likely executed by using remote control technology to override the pilots of the commandeered aircraft. Under this theory, the nineteen hijackers were stooges who believed they were participating in a legitimate military exercise—though many of Jones’ followers believe the men are still alive, and have developed a rich literature detailing their sightings.
When you ask Jones about all of this, one of the first things he’ll tell you is that he “predicted” 9/11. What actually happened was this: On July 25, 2001, Jones warned viewers of his Infowars TV show that the U.S. government was planning a terrorist attack against its own citizens—flashing the White House’s phone number so that people could call in and beg the president not to go through with the dastardly plot. In the broadcast, which now circulates widely on the Internet, Jones does not identify the World Trade Center as a future target, but he does declare—in typically Jonesian language—that “the United States is a shining jewel the globalists want to bring down and they will use terrorism as the pretext to get it done,” and that Osama bin Laden is “the bogeyman [the government] need[s] in this Orwellian system.”
Talking to Jones is exhausting. He spits out every sentence as if he were calling the police to report a crime in progress—footnoting each eyebrow-raising claim with scattered (but oddly precise) references to Internet news sources. As Radar magazine writer Jebediah Reed put it, he speaks “in a gravelly baritone fit for the public address announcer at a monster truck rally—a voice so gruff it almost sounds like he’s faking it.”
He throws around acronyms like “PNAC” (Project for the New American Century, a Truther obsession described in more detail later in this book), and talks casually of NATO’s role in engineering “the 888 attacks” (his term for the brief 2008 war between Russia and Georgia). Jones has lived and breathed these sorts of conspiracy theories for years. It’s not clear that this New World Order prophet could turn his obsession off—though he claims he’d like to . . . if only the world would let him. “Once you discover reality, what is being admitted, all the crimes, and you go around to the zombie-like media and tell people to read all this stuff, and they just giggle and say none of this exists, that government is good, it’s upsetting, and so you try to wake people up,” he tells me, slowing down the pace of his manic verbiage only slightly as he adopts the weary tone of a political martyr. “People laughed at us, and now it’s all coming true. Even though I’m sick of doing this, I do it anyway. Somebody’s got to do this.”
One would have thought that the Republicans’ across-the-board losses in the 2008 elections would have provided Jones with peace of mind: Surely, one of the first things that Barack Obama and incoming administration officials would do is unearth the murderous 9/11 lies of their ousted opponents.
But Jones—like other Truthers—scoffs at the illusion that Obama will ever willingly permit Americans to get at the truth (“smoking Demo-crack” many activists call it). When it comes to who calls the real shots in Washington, he tells me, there is no difference between Republicans and Democrats: “They answer to the same people. The president is nothing more than a pitch man—a Madison Avenue front.” Like all committed conspiracy theorists, he is able to incorporate any new piece of information or historical development into a preexisting framework.
All governments, Jones believes, use terrorism and staged acts of warfare to hoodwink their citizens and gain support for their agendas—from the sinking of the Maine, to the Reichstag fire (Jones’ favorite historical reference), to Pearl Harbor (“The Honolulu Advertiser newspaper was telling readers the attack was coming seven days before it happened”). In the case of Obama, Jones sees dark hints of things to come in the mused-about carbon tax, the proceeds from which, he believes, will one day be paid to a global overlord. The same goes for Washington’s bank bailout: In a full-length film he’s produced—The Obama Deception—Jones alleges “international bankers purposefully engineered the worldwide financial meltdown to bankrupt the nations of the planet and bring in World Government.
“Bottom line, the future as I see it is this: 70 percent Brave New World, 30 percent Nineteen-Eighty-Four,” he tells me. “There’ll be lots of video games, drugs, Soma, Prozac, parties—but if you get out of line, the SWAT team’s coming.”
Some Caveats
This is a book about American conspiracism’s history and mythology (Chapters 1 through 4), psychological and religious roots (Chapters 5 and 6), propagation through modern media, academic and activist networks (Chapters 7, 8, and 9), and, more generally, the manner in which it erodes our society’s collective grasp on reality. In Chapter 10, I offer suggestions for countering the spread of conspiracy theories—including a brief description of a hypothetical academic course that would give college students the tools needed to identify and debunk conspiracist ideologies.
Before proceeding further, let me offer five caveats about the way the material is presented.
First, this book focuses primarily on conspiracism in the United States and the Internet-based conspiracist culture that has grown out of it, with some coverage of prominent Canadian theorists who have taken an active role in promoting American conspiracist narratives. (True to its moderate stereotype, my native Canada has virtually no indigenous conspiracist culture of its own, except in regard to phobias of U.S. hegemony. And so its paranoiacs tend to co-opt American obsessions with JFK, 9/11, the USS Liberty, and the like.)
The 9/11 Truth movement is widespread beyond North America’s shores—particularly in the Muslim countries of the Middle East and South Asia. But in these parts of the world, such theories are wrapped up in complicated ways with anti-Americanism, colonialism, and the long history of the West’s interaction with what was once called the Third World—issues that lie beyond the scope of this book.
Second, this book is not intended as a rebuttal to conspiracists. Nor will I provide a complete recitation of their elaborate proofs. Those seeking a point-by-point rebuttal to the claims of the 9/11 Truth movement already have several fine resources at their disposal. In particular, I recommend the 2006 book Debunking 9/11 Myths: Why Conspiracy Theories Can’t Stand up to the Facts, authored by the editors of Popular Mechanics magazine; Mark Roberts’ Links for 9/11 Research; the websites 911 Myths, Debunking 911, and the blog Screw Loose Change. Readers who wish to devote more time to the issue might also consider reading the Final Report of the 9–11 Commission, released in 2004; Lawrence Wright’s Pulitzer Prize–winning 2006 account of the history of 9/11, The Looming Tower; and, for those who share my interest in technical material, the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s exhaustive Final Reports of the Federal Building and Fire Investigation of the World Trade Center Disaster (a twenty-million-dollar effort that took three years to produce, and drew on the efforts of three hundred staff and external experts). I also recommend a brief, but highly illuminating 2006 paper by explosives and demolitions expert Brent Blanchard entitled A Critical Analysis of the Collapse of WTC Towers 1,2&7 From a Conventional Explosives and Demolitions Industry Viewpoint. It can be found on the website of the Journal of Debunking 9/11, which contains a number of other interesting articles aimed at helping laypeople refute Truther claims.
Third, a note about terminology: Throughout this book, I employ the terms “conspiracy theory” (and, interchangeably, “conspiracism”) to describe 9/11 Truth and similar movements. The phrase is defined by Merriam-Webster’s as “a theory that explains an event or set of circumstances as the result of a secret plot.” But that formulation is broad enough to encompass actual historical conspiracies, such as the plot to frame Alfred Dreyfus in the 1890s, the 1972 plot by members of the Committee to Re-elect the President to spy on the Democratic National Committee headquarters, and the actual al-Qaeda plot that led to 9/11. So instead, I adopt the narrower definition set out by Oxford University conspiracy theory scholar Steve Clarke and Brian Keeley of Pitzer College (formerly of Washington University): A theory that traces important events to a secretive, nefarious cabal, and whose proponents consistently respond to contrary facts not by modifying their theory, but instead by insisting on the existence of ever-wider circles of high-level conspirators controlling most or all parts of society.
Fourth, a caveat about the different types of conspiracy theories discussed in this book: As political scientist Michael Barkun has noted, conspiracy theories usually can be classified as either “event” or “systemic.” In the former case, the conspiracist is merely seeking to explain a discrete event—such as, say, the moon landing, or a hypothetical Elizabethan plot to pass off Francis Bacon’s plays as William Shakespeare’s. In the case of systemic conspiracy theories, on the other hand, the theory purports to explain the operation of whole societies, and often the entire planet. This book deals primarily (though not exclusively) with systemic conspiracy theories, such as 9/11 Truth, since they are far more damaging to the marketplace of ideas. That said, I do not take pains in the text to assign conspiracy theories to one category or the other.
Fifth, a note about the people who are the subject of the case study at the heart of this book.
Many Americans view 9/11 Truthers as inherently contemptible. Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer, for instance, has declared that Truthers “derangedly desecrate” the victims of 9/11. While I understand why people hold that view, most Truthers I’ve met actually tend to be outwardly respectful of the innocent victims who perished in the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks. In fact, many of the most prominent boosters of the Truther movement—including some of the so-called Jersey Girls—have themselves been 9/11 widows or first responders (a psychological phenomenon I describe in the “damaged survivor” subsection of Chapter 5). At Truther events I’ve attended in the New York City area, organizers have raised thousands of dollars for police and firefighters who became sick or injured on 9/11, and sometimes (though not always) there is plenty of genuine American patriotism on display.
Moreover, let it be said that not all conspiracy theories are equally malign.
Some of the conspiracist movements I discuss in this book—such as the Ku Klux Klan, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and Holocaust revisionism—are explicitly racist or anti-Semitic. By including these historical references, I am not suggesting that Truthers harbor any equivalent hatred. Most Truthers actually cast themselves as enemies of bigotry whose mission is to expose the truth about a racist, white, imperialist war machine originally set into motion by the Christian crusader George W. Bush.
It also bears mentioning that the Truth movement is entirely nonviolent. Their meetings and literature typically are suffused with exhortations to tolerance and respect. When they demonstrate publicly, they get permits, and usually follow police instructions carefully. (I know this from eyewitness observations: I’ve marched with them several times, and have never seen anyone arrested.) Unlike hate-fueled conspiracist movements that fired adherents up by calling for pogroms against Jews or blacks (or even full-blown insurgency against the government), Truthers appeal to due process and the American Constitution. Their professed goal is to put America’s leadership on trial according to the existing laws of the land.
The threat currently posed by modern conspiracists is not physical, but cultural. Like other groups that have effectively opted out of America’s ideological mainstream, they threaten to turn the country into a sort of intellectual Yugoslavia—a patchwork of agitated cults screaming at one another in mutually unintelligible tongues. It’s a trend that every thinking person has a duty to fight.