Among the Truthers

by Jonathan Kay

  Amid this science-fiction carnival, Revelation describes, almost in passing, a more mysterious figure who also fights on the dark side—a “false prophet” who “deceived those who had received the mark of the beast and those who worshiped his image.” His role in Revelation is brief: He is barely introduced before being flung into the Lake of Fire along with Satan. Yet somehow, he has attained a starring role in many of the secular conspiracy theories that have grown out of America’s Evangelical Christian tradition, including the conspiracist mythology currently at play on the extreme right wing of American politics.

  False prophets pop up elsewhere in the Bible. Deuteronomy, for instance, warns the faithful of polygamous confidence men who pretend to predict the future, and commands death for one who “speaks in the name of other gods.” But the false prophet in Revelation is not just some wandering nuisance, tempting villagers with hocus pocus: He is a singular creature, the seductive scout of the Antichrist himself. It is this image of the false prophet that has embedded itself in America’s Evangelical Christian culture over the years; and from there, into the country’s conspiracist literature, as a biblical prototype to describe any charming, smooth-talking politician suspected of selling America out to some Satan or other—be it communism, militant Islam, or green one-worldism. In fiction, the false prophet is epitomized by Leonardo Fortunato, the preening right-hand man to Antichrist Nicolae Carpathia in the massively popular Left Behind series of Christian novels. But in the real world of politics, he is now known as Barack Obama.

  Some right-wing Christians are willing to go all the way, and declare Obama to be Satan himself. One popular parlor game on religio-conspiracist websites, for instance, is to prove this linkage by torturing the words of no less an authority than Jesus. A common starting point is Luke 10:18, which has Jesus state: “I beheld Satan as Lightning fall from Heaven.” (“How does a Jewish rabbi, which Jesus is credited with being, say in Hebrew, that Satan is like lightning from heaven?” one site informs us. “Barack, also transliterated as Baraq in Hebrew, is lightning . . . The only way a Jewish rabbi can say in Hebrew that Satan is lightning is, ‘Satan Barack!’”) But the more common tactic is to instead present Obama as the front man for satanic forces that lie outside the United States. Pennsylvania-based conspiracy theorist Victor Thorn provides a typical specimen in his 2009 book Barack Obama: Devil. “Obama is the weak little man in front of the curtain, while the booming voice of his Oz-like globalist controllers looms through blips on an electronic screen. They pull the levers, and he dangles by their strings. He is the puppet of hope, a marionette Pied Piper leading us to a financial and spiritual Golgotha.”

  Whatever the details, the overarching thesis hews to the same False Prophecy myth: That Obama is not an ordinary politician, or, indeed, on some cosmic level, an ordinary human being. Rather, he is counterfeit in some fundamental and very dangerous way—a Manchurian Candidate—an unholy replicant who has come from beyond American shores (metaphorically or otherwise) to tempt Americans along some demonic path.

  As with all conspiracy theories, there is a sliver of truth to the Birthers’ anti-Obama mythology: America’s forty-fourth president truly does have an unusual background, one full of genuinely radical influences. In his teenage years, Obama took cocaine and flirted with extreme leftist ideologies. While climbing the ladder of influence in Chicago, he made his bed with a menagerie that included a crook, a former terrorist, and a black-power preacher who spouted toxic anti-American conspiracy theories. For a brief period during his childhood, moreover, Obama was raised as a Muslim in Indonesia, and received a standard Islamic-themed education at a public school in that country—not damming facts in and of themselves, but unprecedented for someone who would become president of the most religious Christian nation on the planet.

  Moreover—and this is the fact that truly sticks most painfully in the craw of many Birthers I’ve interviewed—the mainstream media has seemed entirely uninterested in investigating any of this. Worse: It heaps abuse and accusations of racism on those who do, suggesting that their inquiries can be explained by nothing except bigotry. (And yet this is the same media that went after George W. Bush’s past so ferociously that a veteran CBS anchor was willing to sacrifice his entire career for the sake of a dubious tidbit about the President’s wartime discharge records.) If the mainstream media isn’t willing to investigate the dirt about Obama we do know to be true—the theory goes—who knows what other dirt is out there?

  None of this is to excuse the wild Birther extrapolations detailed in the paragraphs below. But it does go some way to show that their accusations don’t exactly rise out of the ether: In a way, Birthers are a product of the liberal media that now heaps abuse on them.

  Glenn Beck and the New Populism

  On October 30, 2010, nine months after I’d attended the inaugural Tea Party National Convention in Nashville, I spent time with another, equally fed-up voting bloc. But these people weren’t angry. They were just . . . bemused. The event was Jon Stewart’s “Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear,” a comedy and music jamboree on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. It was billed as nonpartisan—with Jon Stewart playing the role of “sane” centrist jousting with faux-blowhard faux-fearmongering Stephen Colbert. But when I spoke to people in the crowd, it became clear that this was a solidly left-wing event. Not so much pro-Democrat—these folks are too jaded for party politics—as anti–Tea Party.

  Like Tea Partiers, the Jon Stewart brigade has a narrative about a country that has been hijacked by extremists. For the Tea Partiers, those extremists are Barack Obama and his big-spending “socialist” allies in Congress. For the Stewart-ites, the hijackers are the Tea Partiers themselves, along with the enabling hard-right media culture spawned by FOX News.

  The signs I saw on the Mall that day said it all. One trio at the rally dressed up in an Alice-in-Wonderland motif, and had a placard that read “I stopped having Tea Parties when I was 17!” There also was “Palin/Voldemort 2012,” “I like tea—and you’re kind of ruining it,” and “Free hugs! (from a militant atheist with a gay agenda).” A major theme on the signage was the idea that taxes aren’t the menace to society that Glenn Beck claims. Examples included: “Raise my taxes (please),” “I have no problem paying taxes because I’m an adult, and that’s part of the deal,” and “Who needs health care—just say ‘no’ to illness!” Another read: “CUT SPENDING NOW! BUT DON’T YOU DARE TOUCH MY: Social security, Medicare, Medicaid, Defense spending, Home ownership interest deduction, Home buyer tax credit, Farm subsidies, Children’s health insurance fund, Retirement benefits, Disability benefits, Federal education subsidies, National Institutes of Health, Department of Agriculture, Appalachian Regional Commission, Department of Commerce . . .”

  Walking among these people, it was almost hard to believe that they shared the same country with the activists I’d met in Nashville. It wasn’t just that they urged their government to support different political priorities. They disagreed on the far more fundamental issue of whether the very concept of government itself is a presumptive force for good or evil.

  How did the United States become so profoundly divided on such a basic question?

  America’s most exalted ideal is liberal individualism—the belief that each person’s fate should be limited only by their God-given talents, the breadth of their imagination, and the strength of their character. From the Declaration of Independence, to the Bill of Rights, to the Emancipation Proclamation, to Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech, the notion has continued to sit at the very foundation of America’s national self-conception.

  It’s an inspiring vision. But also an emotionally exhausting one—for it makes every American the master of his own failures.

  In every society preceding the American Revolution (and in many non-Western societies, still), a man’s life largely was governed by factors beyond his control—by birth order, ancestry, caste, guild, religious edicts, and the feast-or-famine vicissitu
des of nature. Every major decision in his life—whom he would marry, where he would live, what profession he would follow—was decided by others: parents, priests, clan patriarchs.

  The modern Western mind recoils at such strictures. But it is important to remember that they at least served to confer some measure of dignity upon society’s bottom rungs. A low-caste nineteenth-century Indian latrine cleaner or corpse handler may have had every reason to curse his fate as an “untouchable”—but he could not feel responsible for his own failure to rise up in society: The rules precluding him from advancing in life were explicitly articulated and enforced by a very real conspiracy of high-caste elites. In America, on the other hand, life’s losers have no one to blame but themselves. And so the conceit that they are up against some all-powerful corporate or governmental conspiracy comes as a relief: It removes the stigma of failure, and replaces it with the more psychologically manageable feeling of anger.

  America’s culture of individualism can drive even the most successful Americans to conspiratorial social fantasy—though for reasons connected more with politics than personal achievement.

  On parchment, the United States may be the land of freedom. Yet, as discussed in Chapter 1, the reality of twenty-first-century America is a place where citizens are constrained in virtually every sphere of human activity. A libertarian social contract—a realistic option in the pastoral frontier society of America’s formative years—is an anachronism in today’s industrialized, high-density consumer society, in which government is expected to regulate trillions of dollars’ worth of trade between strangers, protect more than three hundred million people from crime, ensure universal literacy, prevent epidemics, save endangered species, police the airwaves, prop up failing banks, take care of the poor and old, and maintain a continental network of public roads and airports. From the very moment of America’s creation, the march of technology and the growing complexity of society have given politicians no choice but to systematically prune the individual freedoms the proud American yeomen of yore took for granted—a process that’s put much of life in the hands of government, corporations, and even machines.

  Populist conspiracism flourishes in America in part because it helps resolve the cognitive dissonance generated by this gulf between liberalism’s theory and practice—between the ideals embedded in America’s national myths, and everyday reality. (In this respect, it follows the pattern of the “failed historian” conspiracist type discussed in the next chapter’s typology.) But not for the evil machinations of this or that cabal, the fantasy goes, we’d be able to dial back the national time machine to a golden age of frontier libertarianism.

  In the economic sphere, populist conspiracism also serves as an outlet when popular frustration boils over in the face of gross wealth inequality, abusive corporate practices, and cataclysmic economic busts—the populist uprising of the 1890s and the most extreme elements of today’s Tea Party movement being the most obvious bookends.

  Across Europe and other parts of the world, this type of frustration typically is channeled through Marxism and its various revolutionary offshoots. But as Michael Kazin noted in The Populist Persuasion, Americans already had their revolution at the act of creation. And so they channel their class antagonism through a reactionary lens. As Kazin writes, “There have, of course, been populisms in the history of other nations . . . But populism in the United States has made the unique claim that the powers that be are transgressing the nation’s founding creed, which every permanent resident should honor . . . Radical transformations undertaken in other societies under such banners as socialism, fascism and anti-colonialism are thus impossible in the United States—at once the most idealistic and the most conservative nation on earth.”

  In broad strokes, American-style populism (especially the left-wing strain that predominated till the late 1940s) shares some attributes of Marxism in the sense that both presume an epic conflict between society’s elites and its toiling masses. But while Marxists cast the fight between rigidly defined classes as an eternal, defining aspect of capitalism, populists do not. True to the evangelical spirit, they regard even the worst abuses as a function of a particular kind of predatory capitalist (and his political enablers) whose perverting effect upon the economy can be purged through spiritually infused collective action, thereby restoring American capitalism to its original state of grace. Unlike many Europeans, who retain vestiges of a precapitalist class mentality, even the poorest American believes he can become rich—if only Big Government and corrupt corporations get out of the way.

  To quote one of my correspondents, Rick Hydrick of Penryn, California: “[Ours] is not the populism of the past, which often looked for socialistic remedies. It is a new populism, looking for its lost, constitutional liberties. Liberalism has resulted in a bloated, desensitized government. Obama’s antidote is hyperliberalism. His natural instinct during a recession is to create government jobs, not to move out of the way of people trying to live by their own wits. He is incapable of thinking otherwise, having never tested those waters. Progressive liberalism and constitutional conservatism are antithetical to each other—oil and water. They cannot be mixed, though the majority of people in this country struggle in vain to do so, blinded by a basic lack of understanding of these political philosophies, severely handicapped by decades of neglect. They are awakening to the atrophying and unsustainable effects of progressive liberalism, wherein they allowed themselves to be duped by the counterfeits of liberty and freedom—social justice and entitlements.”

  Perhaps the purest example of this brand of populism to be found on the modern American stage is FOX News host Glenn Beck. In the summer of 2010, Beck published a conspiracist novel, The Overton Window, in which an evil cabal of government officials, Wall Street tycoons, and multinational corporations seek to sow the seeds of one-world corporate tyranny by staging a false-flag nuclear attack in Las Vegas. In a telling speech, one of the novel’s heroines tells an assembled crowd that their mission is to “restore what’s been forgotten [in America]. Restore. Not adapt, not transform . . . restore.

  “Don’t be fooled,” she goes on. “ ‘Transformation’ is simply a nice way of saying that you don’t like something! If you live in an old house that you adore, do you talk about ‘restoring’ that home or ‘transforming’ it into a modern-day McMansion? . . . I don’t know about you, but I happen to believe that the America our Founders created is still worth preserving.”

  American populism is not, strictly speaking, a utopian creed, like Marxism or fascism: It does not imagine society being driven toward some purified paradise. It acknowledges that capitalism produces winners and losers, and merely demands something resembling a fair playing field. But it does share with utopian ideologies and religious faiths the idea of returning society to some original state of grace—the sparsely populated, lightly taxed, barely regulated nation of self-reliant farmers, prospectors, craftsmen, and rural yeomen that existed in the decades following independence. In its Tea Party manifestation, it also urges rigid fidelity to a foundational text—the U.S. Constitution—that is imagined to provide ancient answers to our modern problems.

  Some conservative Christian activists even blur the line between the Constitution and the Bible by claiming that the latter inspired the former—this being the thesis of a 1981 book, The 5,000 Year Leap, which Glenn Beck, among others, have credited with forming their political philosophy. In this telling, the Founding Fathers are transformed into something resembling religious saints, and policy questions are settled by speculating about what view those men would have taken. Following her interviews with Tea Party supporters, Harvard historian Jill Lepore channeled their outlook this way: “That the Constitution speaks to us the way Jesus speaks to us in the Gospels. That it comes alive when we read it today. That it is our form of scripture. And that all the intervening years between the drafting of the U.S. Constitution in 1787 and the present don’t matter. That those years represent a corruption from a
state of purity . . . It’s a particular form of Protestantism and a kind of understanding of the Bible as literal truth that has a really strong hold on America and in American religious culture.”

  The idea that an eighteenth-century-style social contract can cure America of its twentieth-century ills is attractive in the way that all romantic political ideologies seem attractive in turbulent times. But as several generations of conservative populists can attest, the romance always ends in heartbreak: Once elected, every modern politician, no matter how ostensibly conservative, eventually will have to hang up his tricorner hat, sit down at his desk, and confront the same modern-world realities that greeted his predecessor. Ronald Reagan is the greatest hero in the history of American conservatism. But even he couldn’t find a way to eliminate a single major spending program during his presidency. George W. Bush, denounced by liberals as a heartless “neocon” during his two terms in office, actually added a major spending program—the Medicare drug benefit.

  Such hypocrisy is old news among American political pollsters. As far back as 1964, two scholars—Lloyd Free and Hadley Cantril—used Gallup Poll data to cross-index American attitudes toward government programs and respondents’ professed ideological beliefs. What they found was that overlapping majorities of Americans expressed support both for small government in principle, and big-government programs in practice—a paradox Cantril identified in an influential book, Political Beliefs of Americans, as nothing less than “mildly schizoid.” The same phenomenon manifests itself today among conservatives who make radical claims about the need to scale back the size of government, but also express satisfaction with classic welfare-state programs such as Medicare and Social Security. In late 2010, a poll conducted by the Washington Post, the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation, and Harvard University revealed that a majority of Americans who say they want more-limited government also believe that Medicare and Social Security are “very important.” Likewise, more than half of self-declared Tea Party supporters said the government should maintain or increase its involvement in poverty eradication.