by Jonathan Kay
Over the last decade, many Muslims followed this same pattern in regard to the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Minnesota-based Muslim convert Kevin Barrett, for instance, tells his Truther audiences that Osama bin Laden could never have been behind 9/11 because the al-Qaeda leader embodies his religion’s dedication to “peace and truth.” As described in Chapter 9, Barrett, like many other Muslim conspiracy theorists, identifies Jews and Zionists as the true perpetrators of the 9/11 plot. In this way, their conspiracy theory does double duty for psychological purposes: It absolves Islam of a terrible crime, while furthering the preferred narrative of murderous Israeli aggression. For related psycho-political reasons, many Muslims (including Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad) also have joined the ranks of Holocaust deniers: Since the international movement to create a Jewish state gained strength and urgency following Hitler’s extermination of six million Jews, it is imagined by militant anti-Semites that Israel’s raison-d’être can somehow be undone by rewriting history to Hitler’s advantage.
Many Westerners with no positive ethnic or religious attachments also fall into the failed historian category through their embrace of strident anti-Americanism. (As Orwell wrote in his essay, the nationalistic pathology “may work in a merely negative sense, against something or other and without the need for any positive object of loyalty.”) According to this brand of thinking, which has come to dominate large swathes of the Western intelligentsia over the last half-century, the great engine of evil in the world is American hegemony—and so every epic tragedy the world suffers must somehow be laid at Washington’s doorstep.
In this category, one finds antiwar and antinuclear activists of Cold War vintage, with political views steeped in the anti-American lore surrounding Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Vietnam, and the covert wars of Latin America. Their ideological heroes are Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn, whose fixation on American “state terrorism” encourages the notion that Washington is capable of boundless evil.
English professors, cultural-studies specialists, and modern-languages types are well represented in this conspiracist niche. So, too, are experts in “globalization studies”—such as Anthony J. Hall of the University of Lethbridge in Alberta, one of Canada’s most aggressive Truthers. One also tends to find a surprising number of poets (perhaps because their day jobs already require them to weave a self-invented reality from their own stream of consciousness). Rhyming conspiracists include British Columbia–based Truther Frank Moher, New York City’s Jerry Mazza (who delivers poetry readings at 9/11 anniversary events in New York City), and black nationalist Amiri Baraka (born LeRoi Jones), whose poem Somebody Blew Up America got him ejected from his job as New Jersey’s poet laureate:
Who the Devil on the real side
Who got rich from Armenian genocide . . .
Who own the oil
Who want more oil
Who told you what you think that later you find out a lie . . .
Who knew the bomb was gonna blow
Who know why the terrorists
Learned to fly in Florida, San Diego . . .
Who killed Malcolm, Kennedy & his Brother
Who killed Dr King, Who would want such a thing?
Are they linked to the murder of Lincoln? . . .
Who set the Reichstag Fire
Who knew the World Trade Center was gonna get bombed
Who told 4,000 Israeli workers at the Twin Towers
To stay home that day
Why did Sharon stay away?
Who, Who, Who
Unfortunately, Baraka is hardly an outlier within the field of black identity politics, which (for understandable historical reasons) comprises America’s most consistently fertile breeding ground for failed-historian conspiracism. Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, for instance, has suggested that the destruction of New Orleans’ levee system in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina was part of a plot to kill the city’s black population; and delivers speeches in which he blames the world’s problems on the “Jew Rothschild” (“Four things were set up in the year 1913: First, the Federal Reserve Bank, the IRS, the FBI, and the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai Brith. All were set up in the same year. Is that a coincidence, or is there a tie-in?”)
Following the financial crisis of late 2008, the failed historian began showing up in the form of shell-shocked free-market purists (often in Tea Party garb), who could not accept that the greatest recession of our time had been sparked by the recklessness of homeowners, overleveraged banks, greedy mortgage brokers, and other private actors. As discussed in the previous chapter, they have conquered their cognitive dissonance with the theory that the crisis actually was part of a secret plot hatched by Barack Obama and other liberals to destroy capitalism. This theory has become so common in Tea Party circles that it now goes by a commonly recognized shorthand—the “Cloward-Piven Strategy,” named after two 1960s-era left-wing Columbia University sociologists. (As with many of the conspiracy theories I have described in this book, there was a real grain of truth in this one: In their now-infamous 1966 article in The Nation, Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven truly did urge Americans to apply for welfare en masse so as to “produce bureaucratic disruption in welfare agencies and fiscal disruption in local and state governments”—with the ultimate goal being “to wipe out poverty by establishing a guaranteed annual income.” This tactic was said to be necessary because “even activists seem reluctant to call for national programs to eliminate poverty by the outright redistribution of income.”)
“The undeniable and shocking truth is that Barack Obama (perhaps purposefully, perhaps unknowingly) is actually following a carefully laid-out strategy for destroying the United States of America that was initially proposed and published by two socialist faculty members at Columbia University (an institution that Barack Obama attended from 1981–83),” declared Joseph Farah’s WorldNetDaily website in a September 2010 email blast. “According to the strategy, the American way of life, as we know it, must be destroyed and discredited because the American people will not accept statism until the present system is destroyed and discredited. And how does one go about destroying and discrediting the system? If you need an example, look no further than the so-called economic stimulus schemes that the Obama Administration and Congress have implemented.”
The Damaged Survivor
On April 2, 2008, World Autism Awareness Day, Larry King devoted his nightly CNN program to “Jenny McCarthy’s Autism Fight.” Anyone who’d followed the debate over the devastating neurological condition instantly knew what to expect from McCarthy that night: Since 2007, the former Playboy model had become the world’s most influential spout of autism misinformation.
Sure enough, a few minutes into the broadcast, McCarthy began telling King about the miraculous autism discoveries she had made on alternative health websites, which, she claimed, had allowed her own son to “recover” from the incurable condition. She also launched into familiar, discredited theories linking autism to vaccines:
McCARTHY: “Parent after parent after parent says I vaccinated my baby, they got a fever and then they stopped speaking and then became autistic.”
KING: “Is your link scientific or statistical?”
McCARTHY: “Well, I believe that parents’ anecdotal information is science-based information. And when the entire world is screaming the same thing—doctor, I came home. He had a fever. He stopped speaking and then he became autistic. I can’t—I can see if it was just one parent saying this. But when so many—and I speak to thousands of moms every weekend and they’re all standing up and saying the same thing. It’s time to start listening to that. That is science-based information. Parents’ [anecdotes] is science-based information.”
A whole book could be written about the conspiracy theories that traffic on “alternative medicine” websites. These include the idea (as already discussed) that water fluoridation is a plot to destroy our minds; that the contrails emitted by passenger aircraft contain exotic chemicals�
�“chemtrails”—designed to alter human behavior; that wi-fi computer signals are eroding our children’s brains; and that AIDS and other serious diseases were designed by the U.S. military for the purpose of culling the world’s population. But of all of these, the most durable and widespread is the notion that vaccines cause autism. This is in large part thanks to the advocacy of celebrity laypersons such as McCarthy and their media enablers at The Oprah Show and, until recently, Larry King Live. Since 1998, when the theory was first put forward in a (since debunked) study published in The Lancet medical journal, millions of parents across the Western world have avoided vaccinating their children, leaving them exposed to deadly, and entirely preventable, diseases such as measles, pertussis, and Hib influenza. A disproportionate number of the parents opting out of vaccinations are from wealthy areas of the country, such as Marin County in California, where McCarthy’s brand of quackery has gained a foothold among web-surfing soccer moms.
Vaccines typically are administered to small children in the first two years of life, at around the same time that the first behavioral symptoms of autism manifest themselves. Many doctors believe autism is a genetic disorder programmed into a child’s brain before birth. But parents cannot see their child’s genes. What they can see is the steel needle that penetrates their then-apparently-perfect bundle of joy, injecting a mysterious foreign substance that (according to strangers wearing white lab coats), prevents an as-yet hypothetical medical condition. When this experience is closely followed by a devastating diagnosis, a link is forged between the two experiences in the minds of many parents—a link that, as many will confess quite candidly, can never be shaken by science. “I know what happened to my son after he got his [measles, mumps and rubella] shot,” the mother of an autistic child told science writer Arthur Allen. “I have no doubt. There’s no way they’ll convince me that all these kids were not damaged by vaccines.”
The myth that vaccines cause autism permits emotionally vulnerable parents to blame politically accountable, human evildoers—the big pharmaceutical companies, and their apologists at the Food and Drug Administration—for a trauma that might otherwise be seen as a mere act of God. As religious martyrs and psychologists alike can attest, virtually any amount of suffering can be endured if the one enduring it feels it has a purpose. What I call “damaged-survivor” conspiracism emerges out of the mind’s subconscious understanding of this fact: It is a quest to situate one’s travails amid a meaningful struggle against some oppressive evil. The more oppressive the evil, the more meaningful the struggle.
Such myths provide another psychotherapeutic dividend, too: hope. The bogus vaccine-autism link is actually two conspiracy theories in one. Not only do McCarthy and her followers believe that the medical establishment is covering up evidence that its drugs are wrecking children’s brains; they also promote the piggyback conspiracy theory that vitamins and other natural remedies can be used to “heal” the damage done by vaccines, but that this cure is falsely discredited by the very same medical-establishment evildoers. McCarthy, for instance, promotes something called “chelation therapy,” which removes heavy metals from the body. Other parents have turned to more exotic remedies. As Allen reports: “In the homes of autistic children, it is not unusual to find cabinets filled with 40 different vitamins and supplements, along with casein-free, gluten-free foods, antibiotics, and other drugs and potions. Each is designed to fix an aspect of the ‘damage’ that vaccines or other ‘toxins’ caused.”
Many conspiracists I’ve met have themselves experienced a traumatic, life-threatening medical crisis that knocked them out of their normal mental orbit. Often, their stories follow the same pattern: Doctors tried to cure their condition with expensive drugs and painful surgical procedures—but failed. It was only once they’d turned to a “natural” cure—faith healing, homeopathy, Gerson Therapy, or some other kind of placebo-based remedy—that their condition was cured. In the aftermath of this experience, they become convinced that profit-obsessed pharmaceutical companies and the medical establishment more generally have been conspiring to prevent Americans from discovering the power of these natural cures. From their personal experience, they extrapolate to the notion that all of corporate America is engaged in active conspiracy against ordinary American citizens.
In fact, hostility toward conventional medicine is a popular theme in just about every modern conspiracist movement—including Scientology, UFO groups, and 9/11 Truth. Even right-wing conspiracy theorists, no enemies of the free market, tend to embrace herbal miracle-cures and other forms of quack medicine more commonly associated with the vegan Left.
During my interviews in the New York City area, I met a variety of Truthers who fell into the damaged-survivor category: emotionally traumatized parents, children, siblings, or spouses of 9/11 victims, including one genuinely pitiful middle-aged protestor who carries a sign featuring a picture of a handsome young man alongside the words “The NWO [New World Order] murdered my cousin Bradley Van Hoorn.”
Other Truthers in this category include some of the “Jersey Girls” whose activism helped spur the creation of the independent 9/11 Commission; Manny Badillo, a leading New York City-based Truther whose uncle and mentor, Joseph Sgroi, died on 9/11; and Bob McIlvane, a former Philadelphia schoolteacher who became a spokesmen for the Truth movement after losing a son in the North Tower.
Damaged survivors are particularly effective as recruiters for conspiracist movements because the spectacle of their grief short-circuits our intellectual faculties—much in the same way that graphic testimony from a crime victim can sway a jury to convict an innocent defendant. “When I saw Bob [McIlvane] cry at the commission hearings in New York in 2004, it broke my heart,” Pennsylvania-based 911blogger.com founder Jon Gold told me when I asked him what drove his activism. “The anger I felt when I saw we were lied to was enormous. I couldn’t imagine how much extra pain must have been felt by those who actually lost people. I believe they deserve better.”
All of which to say: It is not just because Jenny McCarthy is attractive and famous that she is permitted to promote nonsense medical theories on national television. It is also because she has experienced suffering, a subject that usually can be counted on to arouse the interest of American television viewers, even as it blunts their critical faculties.
In November of 2008, around the time Barack Obama was winning the White House, former Three’s Company star and Thighmaster pitchwoman Suzanne Somers awoke in a state of terror. She was covered in welts, and could barely breathe. By the time her husband had rushed her to the nearest emergency room, she was nearly dead.
When Somers recovered from this genuinely terrifying ordeal, doctors administered a CAT scan. The results were devastating. She’d survived an episode of breast cancer a few years before, and the disease apparently had returned with a vengeance, metastasizing throughout her innards. The tumors were literally too numerous to be counted. One doctor who saw the images told her flatly: “I’ve never seen so much cancer in my life.”
Somers was stunned. She’d done everything right—eaten nothing but natural foods and natural dietary supplements, avoided stress, exercised regularly. Two years before, she’d published a New York Times number one best seller about how to live a long, healthy life. She’d been tested by doctors just three months previous, and come out clean. “How could I have cancer?” she thought to herself.
In fact, Suzanne Somers didn’t have cancer. The images doctors saw on her CAT Scan apparently were the result of an exotic fever she’d contracted while working in her organic garden, possibly exacerbated by an alternative therapy to treat the effects of menopause.
One would imagine Somers being overjoyed by the news that she was cancer-free. But her dominant reaction was fury—not only at the doctors who’d misdiagnosed her, but at the Western medical establishment itself, which, she believes, is conspiring to destroy our health with chemotherapy and other “poisons.” Days later, when Somers was discharged from th
e hospital, one of the first things she did was throw out the medications she’d been prescribed by hospital doctors. Eventually, the whole experience would find its way into her 2009 alternative-medicine book, Knockout: Interviews With Doctors Who Are Curing Cancer.
Like McCarthy and other radicalized critics of modern medicine, Somers has come to view the human body in essentially medieval terms. According to this view—of which there are endless variations, each with its own cult following and mail-order industry—the human body is powered by a natural energy field that becomes compromised when exposed to artificial Western foods, medicines, and medical therapies. Vitamins, obscure extracts, oils, balms, herbs, and meditation are presumptively good. Prescription drugs, radiological treatments, and surgical interventions are presumptively bad. It is a distinction upon which Somers herself is willing to stake her life: She tells readers that, if again faced with a cancer diagnosis, “my choice overwhelmingly would be to use only alternative treatments.”
Knockout promotes a variety of dubious therapies—such as laetrile, an apricot extract that was proven ineffective decades ago; and “the Gonzalez protocol,” a bizarre regimen involving twice-daily coffee enemas. If only the medical establishment and the FDA took these treatments seriously, Somers argues, researchers would receive the funds needed to prove their effectiveness. Instead, the health care industry and its cynical government allies conspire behind closed doors to protect the cash cow of conventional cancer therapies. “Pharma is not interested in anything that comes from nature. Anything from nature cannot be patented,” Somers writes. “That is why so often many natural alternatives to serious diseases never see the light of day.”