by Matt Taibbi
“Anyway,” I said, eyes darting left and right, “I just think now is the time to act. We’ve got to get people together and hit Congress, let ’em know we’re here.”
The moderator, a soft, curly-headed teacherish type named Geoff—the kind of guy who would have been a perfect physical fit as an activities counselor at a substance abuse retreat, passing out volleyballs to upper-class drunks—stood at the lectern and scanned the crowd. “Okay, well, that’s certainly a good idea,” he said, mock-clapping. “We do have to organize. Anyone else have a comment or a question? Yes? You in the back?”
There were about twenty-five people in the small church where we were meeting, mostly middle-to upper-class whites but of varying ages. Most of the people had come alone, although there were a few pairs. Attire was solidly post-hippie/film school, lots of ruffled hair, black T-shirts, olive tones, goatees—a crowd you’d expect to see at a Werner Herzog film festival.
A microphone was passed to the man in the back. He looked older, I guessed mid-forties, largeish, dressed in work clothes. He grabbed the mic and stood up.
“Thanks,” he said. “Yeah, I just wanted to say that I think it’s important for everybody to remember that what’s going on right now is that they’re provoking a war between the monotheists. They’re setting the Christians against the Moslems, so that they’ll wipe each other out. Then the Luciferians’ll move in.”
“Exactly,” shouted a woman on my side of the church. “It’s the Antichrist. It’s all in the Bible.”
“Hmm,” said Geoff. “I don’t know. That’s an interesting comment, though. I appreciate that. Anyone else?”
A redheaded man in his early forties in the back stood up. “I have one thing to add,” he said. “Listen, they’ve got the courts. They’ve got the media. We still have the Internet, but they’re looking for ways to take that away, too. I mean, they’ll take that away, eventually. What I’m saying is that we have to find a way to communicate after they take that away. We’ve got to be prepared!”
Light murmurs, applause.
“Okay, thanks,” said Geoff. “Preparation is good, I agree. Thank you.”
It went on like this for a while, then the Q&A broke up so that the group could watch a Truther film called Everybody’s Gotta Learn Sometime. The film was a hodgepodge of boilerplate 9/11 Truth assertions, i.e., that the 9/11 Commission investigation was a massive coverup, that the 9/11 hijackers had ties to the FBI and the Republican Party, that the Twin Towers were brought down by controlled demolitions and not by crashing airplanes, etc. It also had some new stuff in there, including a deft little tie-in to Jack Abramoff—according to the film, hijacker Mohamed Atta was seen on Abramoff’s floating casino in south Florida prior to the 9/11 attacks. There were also long clips culled from various dystopian films that were often shown as “background material” at Truther gatherings, the Truthers generally believing themselves to be living in a modern version of an Orwell/Huxley/Zamyatin totalitarian paradigm. Brazil, Dr. Strangelove, Starship Troopers, and especially The Matrix (Truthers often talk about the moment of conversion, when you see the truth about the towers, as being like “taking the red pill”) are often unironically recommended as “research material” in Truther gatherings.
The weird moment of Everybody’s Gotta Learn Sometime came when a lengthy segment of the movie Network came on the screen. This was the scene in which the secular ex-anchorman prophet Howard Beale, by now given his own show by the evil networks, implores his audience to abandon TV and get back to reality. “We deal in illusions, man, none of it is true!” he shouts. “But…you’re beginning to believe the illusions we’re spinning here!”
In the scene, Beale is shouting against a background of phony stained glass in the fake studio “temple” that the networks had designed as a set for his Mad Prophet of the Airwaves show.
The stained glass in the movie was a kind of visual joke—a symptom of the TV falseness that had already crept into Beale’s act, a symbol of how TV conquers the genuine dissident by assimilating him. Even as Howard Beale denounced television, he was, simply by virtue of being a staged act on television, part of the problem. “Turn off your television sets…!” Beale shouts. “Turn them off right in the middle of the sentence I’m speaking right now! Turn them off!” Then Beale collapses, apparently dead, and the studio audience cheers as the show’s directors urge them on.
No one, of course, has turned his TV set off. This was supposed to be a very darkly ironic moment in the movie, but here it was, twenty years later, repackaged in a homemade Truther movie and shown in an actual church in southern Texas—the cinema stained glass appearing right in front of an actual dais—as unvarnished, earnest reality.
The irony of the moment was overwhelming. Seeing these people consume this commercial entertainment as a canonical revolutionary tract to me underscored everything the Truther Movement was about. The 9/11 Truth Movement, no matter what its leaders claim, isn’t a grassroots phenomenon. It didn’t grow out of a local dispute at a factory or in the fields of an avocado plantation. It wasn’t a reaction to an injustice suffered by a specific person in some specific place. Instead it was something that a group of people constructed by assembling bits and pieces plucked surgically from the mass-media landscape—TV news reports, newspaper articles, Internet sites. The conspiracy is not something anyone in the movement even claims to have seen with his own eyes. It is something deduced from the very sources the movement is telling its followers to reject.
This has always been one of the key features of the 9/11 Truth Movement. When the left finally found something to revolt over, it turned out to be something entirely fictional, something that not a single person had seen with his own eyes, or felt directly in his bank account, in his workplace, in his home. No one here was revolting over the corrupt medical insurance system, the disappearance of the manufacturing economy, the exploding prison population, the predatory credit industry, the takeover of electoral politics by financial interests. None of the people in this room were bound together by a common problem. What they had in common was a similar response to a national media phenomenon. At some level, this wasn’t even a movement—it was a demographic.
Anyway, the meeting continued. Although the point of the Q&A session was supposed to be a discussion of the movie, the movie had seemingly been forgotten minutes after it ended, and the activity we were now engaging in involved circling the room and giving each individual a chance to vent his or her own personal insane theory of reality. On the side of the hall opposite me was a young man with a shaved head. Angry Bald Guy’s theory was that the Bush family had been involved in these kinds of world domination plots for centuries. He seemed to be frustrated that no one was focusing on this.
“This Bush crime family, they’re hardcore gangsters!” he said.
“Mmm, yes,” said Geoff, nodding.
I could see that this est-style nodding of Geoff’s was only making Angry Bald Guy angrier. His eyes screamed, Stop nodding, you dick! “I just think,” he said, “I just think we have to do something!”
“Well,” said Geoff, “that’s what we’re doing. We’re educating people.”
“No, I mean besides that!” snapped Angry Bald Guy.
Geoff nodded. “Well, I hear you,” he said. “But at this stage, I think that we’re best served by just getting the message out. Making sure people see these DVDs. I think that we’re really accomplishing something here.”
I sighed. If there’s one thing you can always count on, it’s that a lefty political activist will find a way to convince himself that he’s changing the world by watching a movie.
Some weeks later I went with a friend to a meeting of the Houston chapter of the same Meetup group, at a Churchill-themed bar called the Black Lab. My friend “Frank” was actually a reclusive, salt-and-pepper-haired musician who by a factor of at least twenty was a more dedicated neurotic/misanthrope than even I was. I’d convinced him to help me try to make a 9/11-themed dramati
c movie, recruiting the local Truthers to take part. The idea there would ostensibly have been to harvest on film the comedy of Truthers trying to think up a 9/11-themed movie plot, which with any luck would have been pretentious and fantastical; there was always the danger that their creative ideas would have turned out to be brilliant and witty, but I thought it was worth the risk
“It’ll be like Spinal Tap, except no one will be acting,” I said. He shrugged. Frank had suffered greatly at the hand of harebrained, poorly thought-out projects of mine in the past—I still owe him money for work he and his girlfriend did on my now-defunct Buffalo newspaper—but he was bored and decided to give it a shot. Our movie project was stillborn, though; just as in Austin, none of the Houston Truthers wanted to do much more than sit around and talk about their plight.
At the Meetup, led by a laboriously, ponderously slow talker named Mark, the group was on its third monthly meeting and was still trying to decide how often to meet and where. A pale white guy in his late twenties or early thirties who I suspected would end up as the much-hated manager of a chain copy shop someday, Mark had strict rules about who could talk and when, and participants had to follow the rules to a tee or he would cut them off. It was decided at one point that we should list the group’s goals; Mark had us go around in a circle and offer our ideas for a statement of the group’s purpose.
“Let me just say at the outset,” he said, “that those of us who have the views that we do…Well, it can be very lonely, difficult socially, that is, to be a dissident in this day and age. So one of the goals of this group, I would say, is that it will provide all of us with a safe place where we can feel at home, comfortable being ourselves.”
He looked around the room. I couldn’t tell if everyone was embarrassed or whether they agreed with him.
“So I’m just going to write that here on the paper—safe place,” he continued.
Frank glared nervously at me. He had a bit of a panic-attack problem and I could tell this scene was moving him in that direction.
Meanwhile Mark motioned for the next person in line, a quietish student from the University of Houston, to offer his idea.
“Well, I think we have to create an entirely new system of media, completely reforming the existing system,” he said. “Because the current system isn’t telling us the truth, that’s for sure.”
“Damn right,” said someone else at the table.
“Okay, good,” said Mark. He spoke as he wrote: “Create new system of media.”
Frank glared accusingly at me. I smiled.
“Sure, let’s create a new system of media,” I said, out loud. “Might as well start small, right?”
Everyone looked up at me; nobody laughed.
The group ended up split down the middle on the issue of whether or not to schedule an informal “hangout night.” We did agree loosely to try to schedule a movie showing, though settling on an actual date proved too difficult. But the real thrust of the meeting seemed to be a battle for control of the group. Right from the start, Frank and I could see that Mark had a rival in John, an older fellow with a balding head and glasses. John seemed more knowledgeable about 9/11 issues than Mark and also ideologically purer—Mark, heretically, had even expressed doubts about the controlled demolition thesis at the beginning of the Meetup. And the two seemed to disagree about everything, how often to meet, what activities to plan, everything. I personally could feel the energy in the room drifting toward John, and maybe he could feel it, too, because at the end of the meeting he boldly came out with his strategy for the group.
“I think we should post on the message board more,” he said, lightly tapping the table. “Have more discussions!”
Murmuring all around. The group liked that idea. Mark swallowed hard and wrote the idea down on his sheet of paper. Above him, a portrait of Churchill frowned blankly off into space.
Some days later we looked on the Meetup Web site. John had, indeed, been posting more, and so had some other members, including a mysterious new person named “Mauricio,” who was posting quite a lot in semi-grammatical English. Mauricio’s posts had titles like “Passport Cards to Go Hi-Tech In the United States” and “Official 9/11 Story on Life Support: The Truth is Taking Over.” Inside the actual posts, Mauricio would simply retype in some piece of text from another site and then add a link to the rest of the story. None of his posts had any replies. This was certainly “more posting,” and it obviously irked the territorial Mark, who quickly rattled off a lengthy text about posting etiquette.
The letter included six general guidelines about posting, guidelines that included “Take some time putting your message together” and “Try to watch the grammar and spelling” and even “Communication is a 2-way street. If you want folks to read and respond to your messages, you should read and respond to other people’s messages too.” Frank found the post and read the guidelines to me out loud—we almost fell over laughing at number three:
“‘Three. If you make more than 2 or 3 posts in a day, you are posting way above average,’” Frank read. He went on: “‘You’d better have something extraordinarily important or people will just start ignoring you.’”
“Way above average?” I laughed. “There are only like six people on the board as it is!”
“No, it gets better,” Frank said. “Listen to this: ‘I think it will benefit YOU as a message poster if you more-or-less follow these suggestions, because people will take you more seriously and are more likely to read what you post.’” He laughed. “And here’s how he ends it: ‘Again, just suggestions. Other folks might have different visions of how this message board should function. Take care. Have fun. Keep up the good work. Mark.’ Have fun? Fun? What the fuck is wrong with these people? Do other people know about this?”
“Dude, this is like 36 percent of America, according to recent polls,” I said.
“Bullshit.” He frowned nervously. “That can’t be true. You’re lying again.”
I said I wasn’t, but he refused to listen. He kept staring at the screen, muttering to himself. “Fun,” he said. “Have fun. Jesus.”
Back to the site: almost immediately, Mark’s rival, John, posted a soothing letter to Mauricio, but it was too late. That was the end of Mauricio on that board. So much for a “safe place.”
Soon after, Mark dropped out of the group and John took over. In a letter to me, Mark explained that he had become disillusioned with the movement. “My initial beliefs about conspiracy came from a general understanding of how our government operates and what kind of agenda it follows,” he wrote. “And I believe strongly that these are the questions the 9/11 Truth Movement should focus on. We can argue for the rest of our lives about all the different theories about the towers’ collapse, and the ‘shocking proof’ in the form of highly speculative interpretations of photos and videos, and while we struggle with that argument, the noose draws steadily tighter around the neck of American democracy.”
So there! Mark didn’t even sign his name—it was like he wasn’t even talking to me, but to God, to the Fates. And with that, dramatically, this would-be leader was out of the movement. But there were more to take his place; the Meetup kept growing and growing. Months later, the numbers had doubled—but the group was still stuck trying to set up a movie night.
IN THE SPRING a friend of mine named Joel Barkin called and invited me to lunch. Joel is the executive director of the Progressive States Network, a group dedicated to passing progressive laws in America’s state legislatures. He’s a young guy, very idealistic, who grew disillusioned with certain aspects of the system while working as a congressional aide years ago. Whenever the Democrats sell out their electorate somehow, I can count on getting a call from him. And now he was calling me on the heels of the Democrats’ latest failed attempt to stop the war.
He was fuming. He said that since the Democrats won the Congress in the midterm election, an entire peace-movement bureaucracy had magically appeared in Washington, a bureaucracy sta
ffed not by grassroots peace activists but, by and large, by the same hacks who were manning the Democratic ship when the Democrats supported the war.
“It’s the same groups meeting with Pelosi and Reid all the time,” he said. “It’s groups like Americans United for Change, Americans Against Escalation in Iraq, MoveOn, and so on. But here, take a look at this.”
He handed me a piece of paper.
“These are quotes by a guy named Brad Woodhouse,” he said. “Brad Woodhouse is the head of Americans United for Change. He’s one of the leaders of the so-called peace movement in America right now. But check out what he was saying a few years ago, when he worked for [North Carolina Senate candidate] Erskine Bowles.”
There were two Woodhouse quotes on the page:
“No one has been stronger in this race [than Bowles] in supporting President Bush in the war on terror and his efforts to effect a regime change in Iraq,” said Bowles’s spokesman, Brad Woodhouse.
—Charlotte Observer, 9/20/02
“The fact of the matter is, as Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said, we still have a long, hard slog to finish this job in Iraq,” said Brad Woodhouse, spokesman for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee.
—Detroit Free Press, 12/15/03
“A few weeks ago, I was in a meeting with Harry Reid’s people and the peace activism community,” Joel said. “And they were discussing how they were going to pitch the news to the public that the Democrats had decided to pass the war supplemental. And I’m thinking to myself, Why is the activist community working with the Democrats to figure out how to deal with the people? It should be the other way around.”
What Joel was talking about made perfect sense. All along, the thrust of the Democrats’ strategy with regard to the war had been to find a way to take political advantage of antiwar sentiment without hurting themselves electorally. Momentum seemed to have gathered around a strategy of taking a superficial stand against the war while also allowing it to continue long enough to be useful to the Democrats in the ’08 presidential race. Which meant no cutting off the war money, no risking being accused of taking guns out of the troops’ hands during an election season, even if it meant unnecessarily prolonging a deadly conflict. For the activist community to sign off on such a baldly political strategy was monstrous; it was the rankest sort of Washingtonian incest.