Among the Truthers

by Jonathan Kay

  Conspiracy theories, the subject of this book, are both a leading cause and a symptom of this intellectual and civic crisis. When a critical mass of educated people in a society lose their grip on the real world—when they claim that George W. Bush is a follower of Nazi ideology, that Barack Obama is a Muslim secretly plotting to impose Sharia law on America, that the United States government is controlled by Israel, or that FEMA is preparing to imprison political dissidents in preparation for a totalitarian New World Order—it is a signal that the ordinary rules of rational intellectual inquiry are now treated as optional. It is not unusual for intellectuals and politicians to reject their opponents’ arguments. But it is the mark of an intellectually pathologized society that intellectuals and politicians will reject their opponents’ realities.

  As I argue in Chapter 5—my field guide to the different breeds of conspiracy theorist—people come to their paranoias for all sorts of complicated reasons. Some of the figures profiled within this book are Marxists. Others are anti-Semites, or radical libertarians, or religious fantasists. Some defy ideological categorization. But they are all bound together by one increasingly common trait: They have spun out of rationality’s ever-weakening gravitational pull, and into mutually impenetrable Manichean fantasy universes of their own construction. Much of this book is devoted to the task of exploring those fantasy universes and delving into the minds of those who create them—an inquiry that is a critical first step in defending the rationalist tradition.

  It is important to concede that some conspiracies are very real. Watergate was no myth. Neither was Iran-Contra, or the Teapot Dome scandal. There is always a tiny grain of truth at the core of popular conspiracy theories, even in the case of concocted ones. Or at least some vexing question. How did Adolf Hitler exterminate European Jewry without the Allies finding out about it earlier? How was Lee Harvey Oswald able to shoot JFK twice within such a short period of time? Why does the U.S. flag appear to flutter in the moon-landing footage? In most cases, experts can provide persuasive answers. But sometimes, the truth is that we simply don’t know. The world is a complicated place, and some aspects of even the most heavily scrutinized historical events always will remain fissures in society’s intellectual foundations. In normal times, those fissures remain small and inconsequential—fodder for campus crackpots and late night AM call-in shows, perhaps, but nothing more. But in a society whose public intellectual foundations have been compromised over decades, those cracks will spread until the entire edifice is threatened.

  That is what has happened to the United States, a place where millions of American “Birthers” accuse their president of being a foreign-born illegal alien. Other right-wing conspiracists, including no less a political celebrity than the Republicans’ 2008 vice-presidential candidate, accused Barack Obama of creating “death panels” that would send the old and crippled to early graves. In bookstores and movie theaters, Dan Brown became a cultural force of nature by peddling discredited fantasies about Christian conspiracies, freemasonry, and secret societies.

  Most infamously, there is the 9/11 “Truth movement,” whose members have concluded that the September 11 attacks were actually part of an “inside job” hatched by ultra-hawkish elements within the U.S. government in order to secure a pretext for war abroad and draconian repression at home. In the Truther vision of America, our elected government is nothing but a smokescreen for Deep State actors—arms dealers, oil companies, neoconservative ideologues, Strangelovian Pentagon warmongers—who pull our elected politicians’ puppet strings, and control our society at all levels through bribery, murder, and extortion.

  Despite this otherworldly premise, the 9/11 Truth movement has become a mass phenomenon in the last ten years, spawning best-selling books, conferences, a pseudo-academic journal, and dozens of heavily surfed websites. A 2006 Scripps Howard poll of over one thousand U.S. citizens found that 36 percent of Americans believe it was either “somewhat likely” or “very likely” that “federal officials either participated in the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, or took no action to stop them.” About one-sixth of the respondents also agreed it was at least “somewhat likely” that “the collapse of the twin towers in New York was aided by explosives secretly planted in the two buildings.”

  For some Truthers, including many of those I’ve interviewed for this book, the idea that elements within the Bush administration used self-inflicted mass murder as a launching pad for geopolitical adventurism has become a full-time, all-consuming obsession. They include white-collar professionals like Richard Gage, a mild-mannered California architect who spent twenty years designing office buildings and strip malls before giving up everything—his wife, his home, his job—so he could travel the world preaching the gospel that the Twin Towers were felled by controlled demolition; and Steven Jones, a famous Brigham Young University physicist renowned for his work with cold fusion back in the 1980s, who then went on to lead a group called Scholars for 9/11 Truth and Justice. Actor Daniel Sunjata is a Truther (and even was permitted to deliver an in-character Truther monologue during a 2009 episode of the FX Network television drama Rescue Me). So is former pro wrestler and Minnesota governor Jesse Ventura, who went on to host a TV series dedicated to conspiracy theories; Charlie Sheen, who in September 2009 published a lengthy Truther-themed pseudo-interview with Barack Obama; Van Jones, the presidential advisor who was forced to quit his post after it was disclosed that he’d signed a petition seeking a new investigation into 9/11; Jared Loughner, the gunman who shot Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords; as well as Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez. In November 2010, as I was preparing final edits for this book, FOX News Channel analyst (and former New Jersey Superior Court judge) Andrew Napolitano told his audience: “Twenty years from now, people will look at 9-11 the way we look at the assassination of JFK today. It couldn’t possibly have been done the way the government told us.”

  Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is a Truther, too, naturally. In September 2010, he told the United Nations General Assembly that the 9/11 attacks were staged by elements within the U.S. government in order “to reverse the declining American economy and . . . save the Zionist regime.” Just a few days later, he visited Yale University, where he lectured a graduate seminar on “U.S.-Iranian Diplomacy.” Hillary Mann Leverett, the senior research fellow who organized the event, claimed Ahmadinejad’s smooth performance at Yale demonstrated that he is “not a crazy, irrational leader.” On the modern American campus, accepting the truth of 9/11 (not to mention the Holocaust—which Ahmadinejad also doubts) apparently is no longer a prerequisite for “rational” thinkers.

  Despite all this, the 9/11 Truth movement mostly has been ignored by the mainstream media. In some scattered instances, Truthers have appeared on television (usually, on community access), and a few popular left-wing columnists (such as Robert Fisk of Britain’s Independent) have expressed skepticism of the conventionally accepted account of the 9/11 attacks. But in general, mainstream authors and publishing houses have shunned Truthers. To provide them with any sort of media platform, the theory goes, is to “dignify” their position as respectable—the “other side” in a debate we should not even be having.

  But having spent the last three years interviewing Truthers, reading their literature, attending their events, and surfing their discussion forums, I’ve come to a different conclusion. The Truther phenomenon—like the broader intellectual trend it epitomizes—is simply too important to ignore. Truther theories may be nonsense, but the disturbing habits of mind underlying them—a nihilistic distrust in government, total alienation from conventional politics, a need to reduce the world’s complexity to good-versus-evil fables, the melding of secular politics with apocalyptic End-Is-Nigh religiosity, and a rejection of the basic tools of logic and rational discourse—have become threats all across our intellectual landscape. Moreover, journalists’ refusal to engage intellectually with conspiracy theorists only serves to justify their claim—made on bo
th sides of the political spectrum—that the mainstream media is nothing more than a trade shop for establishment propagandists.

  You can’t defeat the Enlightenment’s enemies unless you understand them. And that is the project I ask my readers to embark on as they read this book. Those of us who continue to adhere to the rationalist tradition must commit to its defense, as though the year were 1755 and not 2011. For if the Great Lisbon Earthquake can be said to have inaugurated the Age of Reason, 9/11 and its consequences may yet prove to mark its end.

  Introduction: Stumbling on the Truthers

  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 wer
e 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).