by Jonathan Kay
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 Ch
ange. 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.
Part I
The Truth Movement and Its Ancestors
Chapter One
American Conspiracism: A Brief History
I worked for them . . . I took a position with a group of multinationals we call “The Company.” They call every shot this country takes. What laws to pass. What judges to appoint. What wars to fight. The thing is—if you want to rise in the ranks like I did, you had to commit to leaving everything you knew behind. Because then you start to get access to the real information . . . information that people would do a lot of things to get their hands on—like harm your family.
—Prison Break, Season 1, Episode 19, “The Key”
I know I’m hardly the first one to decide I have had all I can stand. It has always been a myth that people have stopped dying for their freedom in this country, and it isn’t limited to the blacks, and poor immigrants. I know there have been countless before me and there are sure to be as many after. But I also know that by not adding my body to the count, I insure nothing will change. I choose to not keep looking over my shoulder at “big brother” while he strips my carcass, I choose not to ignore what is going on all around me, I choose not to pretend that business as usual won’t continue; I have just had enough.
—Suicide manifesto left by Joseph Stack, who crashed a single-engine plane into an Austin, Texas, building housing IRS offices on February 18, 2010
Programmed for Conspiracy
In the late 1990s, University of Michigan developmental psychologist Margaret Evans became interested in the question of why many Americans doubted the notion of biological evolution. So she began interviewing children of different ages and religious backgrounds about where they thought animals originated.
The responses she got, analyzed in a 2000 academic journal article, revealed an interesting pattern. The youngest subjects, aged four to seven, gave a range of answers—most along the lines of “from someplace else” or “out of the ground.” But among eight-to-ten year olds, the responses were different: “Whatever their family background, most children in this age range endorse the idea that the first kinds of animals were ‘made by someone,’ and often that someone is God.” Only in later years, as children developed the ability for complex, abstract thought, were they able to process the idea of evolutionary change.
Obviously, this reflects the fact that evolution is a complicated scientific concept. But Evans and other researchers believe there is more to it than that: From a young age, human brains seem programmed to see design and intention behind the world around them.
When asked about lions, children tell social science researchers that they exist so we can see them in the zoo. When asked why some rocks are pointy, children will respond: “so that animals won’t sit on them
.” No less a thinker than Aristotle theorized that rocks fell downward so that they could take their natural place in the world. Only in the centuries since the Enlightenment has this outlook been systematically challenged. And even now, it continues to have its defenders—the campaign for “Intelligent Design” as an alternative to random genetic mutation and natural selection being the most prominent example.
Michael Shermer, the editor of Skeptic magazine, and executive director of the Skeptics Society, calls this mode of thinking “agenticity”—“the tendency to believe that the world is controlled by intentional agents, usually invisible, from the top down . . . souls, spirits, ghosts, gods, demons, angels, aliens, intelligent designers, and government conspiracies are all believed to haunt our world and control our lives . . . It even informs our [modern] belief in government.”
How does this thinking evolve? The same way our bodies did.
“Picture yourself in the Neolithic environment of our evolutionary adaptation, and you’re a hominid walking along and you hear a rustle in the grass,” says Shermer. “Is it a dangerous predator or just the wind? Well, if you believed it was a predator, but it was just the wind, you’ve made a [false positive] error. But no problem—no big deal. On the other hand, if you believe the rustle in the grass was just the wind, and it’s actually a dangerous predator, you’re lunch. And so there’s a high cost to making a [false negative] error. [Thus,] our default position is just to assume that all patterns are real. This is the evolution of ‘patternicity’ or superstition. There’s been a natural selection in our cognitive processes of assuming that all patterns are real important phenomena. And we’re the descendants of the most successful patternicity primates.”
At the societal level, the “agenticity” and “patternicity” Shermer describes have shaped the foundational myths that humans develop to infuse meaning into life: We take comfort from the idea that the randomness of human life, with all the attendant sorrows and catastrophes, is actually part of some master plan created by a (usually) unseen higher power. In the Western literary tradition, the prototype was Odysseus, a long-suffering pawn in a feud between the protective Athena and the malicious Poseidon. Aeneas was buffeted by similar divine intrigues on his way to founding Rome. Indeed, the whole arc of Greco-Roman mythology, and even the Bible stories that replaced it, is premised on the idea that human events are guided by mysterious supernatural agents—conspiracy theories in robes and sandals.