Among the Truthers

by Jonathan Kay

  The “stuff” Daly referred to here was, of course, eugenics—the “improvement” of humankind through the selective extermination of “undesirable” elements within the population. As the quotation in the paragraph above illustrates, Daly often spoke of men the way the Nazis spoke of Jews. Should any modern scholar make similar remarks about breeding out, say, blacks, or Jews, or gays, they would instantly become an object of disgrace. Yet Daly continued to be a cult hero among radical feminists until her death in 2010: According to Bridle, she is “one of the most revered visionaries of the contemporary women’s liberation movement” and “the grande dame of feminist theology”—not to mention “a demolition derbyist of patriarchal ‘mindbindings.’ ”

  On a basic level, Daly’s hyperpolitically correct conspiracism can be viewed simply as radical populism stood on its head: Like the militant fringe of the Tea Party movement, Daly believed American society is locked in an ideological war between effeminate, left-wing, pagan ecopacifists and traditionally minded, star-spangled Christian culture warriors. The only point of disagreement is which utopia we should be rooting for—the “necrophilic” America of yesteryear, or the “biophilic” cloud city of the future.

  But in one very profound way, Daly’s left-wing campus conspiracism is actually more radical than the sensational YouTube fare served up even by the most delusional New World Order types. That’s because, for all their paranoia, men such as Alex Jones, Michael Ruppert, David Ray Griffin, Richard Gage, and Joseph Farah truly do believe that the facts of history matter—that there is a central, objective, historical truth out there, and that their own investigations are crucial for finding out what it is. Daly, on the other hand, freely admitted that her historical reveries about a utopian “pre-patriarchal” stage of human history were based on romantic invention. But as she told Bridle, this shouldn’t bother anyone:

  What is the risk? I mean, we live in hell. This is called hell. H-E-L-L—patriarchy. . . . Is it romantic to try to remember something better than that? There’s a reality gap here. How can I make it clearer? We’re living in hell and [a critic is] talking about a danger of romanticism in imagining something that is a hope for something better in the future? I think that the question comes from not looking deeply enough at the horror of phallocracy. . . . If you experience the horror of what is happening to women all the time, it is almost unbearable, right? All the time! . . . Then, when you are acutely aware of that and desire to exorcise it, the exorcism welcomes, requires, some kind of dream.

  All this, I believe, helps explain why there is such a paucity of academic research in the field of conspiracy theories. The tone of the available papers suggests why: Most researchers seem hesitant to suggest that any view of the world—no matter how preposterous—is unambiguously wrong. The guiding notion, echoing the plot of Thomas Pynchon’s influential blockbuster, Gravity’s Rainbow, was that the institutionalized conspiracy woven into the fabric of corporate capitalism is more sinister than any narrative concocted by the likes of the Truth movement.

  In some cases, I found, full-blown conspiracy theories have even made their way into seemingly mainstream university programs. In late 2010, for instance, the University of Lethbridge, in the Canadian province of Alberta, announced that it was awarding a $7,714 scholarship to conspiracy theorist Joshua Blakeney so that he could pursue his 9/11 Truth research under the direction of Globalization Studies professor Anthony Hall, a fellow Truther.

  In 2006, the peer-reviewed Administrative Theory & Praxis, a prestigious quarterly devoted to “critical, normative, and theoretical dialogue in public administration,” and supported by the School of Public Affairs at Arizona State University, published an article by tenured Florida State University professor Lance deHaven-Smith, lamenting that “citizens of the United States continue to be victimized by suspicious incidents that benefit top public officials, and yet Americans have no way of knowing whether the incidents are unavoidable events or, instead, crimes initiated or facilitated by the officials themselves.” DeHaven-Smith’s bill of particulars includes “the defense failures on September 11, 2001 (9/11); the anthrax attacks on U.S. Senators a month later; and the series of terror alerts issued on the basis of flimsy evidence.”

  As it turned out, deHaven-Smith was just getting started. In 2008, he coauthored an academic paper detailing the machinations of a “criminal, militaristic/fiscal cabal” operating at the highest echelons of the U.S government—a group of super-secret James Bond–like agents that he calls “SCAD-Net.” (The acronym stands for State Crimes against Democracy, a term deHaven-Smith proposes as an alternative for “conspiracy theory,” which he complains is “associated with paranoia and hare-brained speculation.”) While the paper begins with the usual array of rarified academic jargon and dense footnotes, it quickly morphs into a freeform conspiracist meditation on Skull and Bones, Malcolm X, and dozens of other conspiracist obsessions. In particular, we learn, JFK’s death was “probably” the work of J. Edgar Hoover, [CIA official] Richard Helms, Lyndon Johnson, [US Air Force Chief of Staff] Curtis LeMay, and (“almost certainly”) Richard Nixon. The Warren Commission was a “cover-up.” SCAD-Net also likely murdered Robert Kennedy, stole the 2000 presidency for Bush-Cheney, and perpetrated the 9/11 attacks. And more plots are on the way: One chapter is entitled “SCAD-Net is likely to strike again in 2012–2013, probably with a ‘dirty’ bomb at a sporting event.” Two years later, in 2010, deHaven-Smith again found a respectable scholarly home for his SCAD-Net conspiracism, this time in American Behavioral Scientist, which devoted its entire February 2010 issue to the subject—much of it consisting of full-blown 9/11 conspiracism.

  According to one of my correspondents, who was present when deHaven-Smith and his coauthors presented their 2008 paper at Virginia Commonwealth University, no one in the crowd seemed distressed that their conference had become a forum for conspiracist fantasies. This did not altogether surprise me: Modern academics tend to romanticize the conspiracy theorist (at least in his nonracist manifestation), imagining him to be a source of “countercultural opposition,” “narratives of resistance,” or (as Foucault called them) “subjugated knowledge.” Many, like deHaven-Smith, refuse even to use the term “conspiracy theory.” Writing in the Journal of Black Studies, for instance, Denison University scholar Anita Waters argued instead for the term “ethnosociology,” and urged that we “reserve opinion” about their truth. By way of example, she cited AIDS conspiracy theories, which might be seen as “a logical outcome of the process by which ‘urban African Americans are struggling to conceptualize the threatening ecological and social decay’ that surrounds them.”

  In his introduction to the 2002 book Conspiracy Nation: The Politics of Paranoia in Postwar America, University of Manchester professor Peter Knight assures his readers that “the essays in this collection refuse instantly to dismiss [conspiracism] as the product of narrow-minded crackpot paranoia or the intellectual slumming of those who should know better.” Rutgers University media-studies professor Jack Bratich, another prominent commentator on conspiracism, criticizes the “expertism” of those who would dismiss AIDS conspiracy theories out of hand, and instead seeks a “nuanced approach” that “looks for their origins in social, cultural and economic conditions.” Skip Willman of the University of South Dakota (formerly of the Georgia Institute of Technology) applauds conspiracy theories as “an oppositional political culture in the shadow of the marketplace and its attendant consumerism.” And then there’s Eithne Quinn, one of a long line of university academics to build her career on the literary analysis of rap-music lyrics. In her essay “All Eyez On Me: The Paranoid Style of Tupac Shakur,” she gushes that Tupac’s violent, obscene conspiracism offers “profound connections between the personal and the political, the psychic and the social, the individual and the larger relations of power. Such critical thinking is of course essential to the production of political consciousness.”

  Among the Antiracists

  Those who authe
ntically commit themselves to the people must re-examine themselves constantly . . . Conversion to the people requires a profound rebirth. Those who undergo it must take on a new form of existence; they can no longer remain as they were. Only through comradeship with the oppressed can the converts understand their characteristic ways of living and behaving, which in diverse moments reflect the structure of domination.

  —Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed

  Sandy, Jim, and Karen work at a downtown community center where they help low-income residents apply for rental housing. Sandy has a bad feeling about Jim: She notices that when black clients come in, he tends to drift to the back of the office. Sandy suspects racism. (She and Jim are both white.) On the other hand, she also notices that Jim seems to get along well with Karen, who is black. As the weeks go by, Sandy becomes more uncomfortable with the situation. But she feels uncertain about how to handle it. Test question: What should Sandy do?

  If you answered that Sandy’s first move should be to talk to Karen, and ask how Jim’s behavior made her feel, you are apparently a better antiracist than I am: That, for what it’s worth, was the preferred solution offered by my instructor at Thinking About Whiteness and Doing Anti-Racism, a four-part evening workshop for community activists, presented in early 2010 at the Toronto Women’s Bookstore.

  My own answer, announced aloud in class, was that Sandy should approach Jim discretely, explaining to him how others in the office might perceive his actions. Or perhaps the manager of the community center could be asked to give a generic presentation about the need to treat clients in a color-blind manner, on a no-names basis.

  The problem with my approach, the instructor indicated, lay in the fact that I was primarily concerned with the feelings of my fellow Caucasian, Jim. I wasn’t treating Karen like a “full human being” who might have thoughts and feelings at variance with her superficially friendly workplace attitude.

  Moreover, I was guilty of “democratic racism”—by which we apply ostensibly race-neutral principles, such as “due process,” constantly demanding clear “evidence” of wrongdoing, rather than confronting prima facie instances of racism head-on. “It seems we’re always looking for more proof,” said the instructor, an energetic thirtysomething left-wing activist named Sheila Wilmot who’s been teaching this course for several years. “When it comes to racism, you have to trust your gut.”

  I felt the urge to pipe up at this. Racism is either a serious charge or it’s not. And if it is, as everyone in this room clearly believed, then it cannot be flung around casually without giving the accused a chance to explain his actions. But I said nothing, and nodded my head along with everyone else. I’d come to this class not to impose my democratic racism on people, but to observe.

  Most of the other thirteen students were grad student types in their twenties—too young to remember the late 1980s and early 1990s, when political correctness first took root on college campuses. The jargon I heard at the Women’s Bookstore took me back to that age—albeit with a few odd variations. “Allyship” has replaced “solidarity” in the antiracist lexicon, for instance, when speaking about interracial activist partnerships. I also heard one student say she rejected the term “gender-neutral” as sexist, and instead preferred “gender-fluid.” One did not “have” a gender or sexual orientation, moreover. The operative word is “perform”—as in, “Sally performs her queerness in a very femme way.”

  Wilmot’s Cold War–era Marxist jargon added to the retro intellectual vibe. Like just about everyone in the class, she took it for granted that racism is an outgrowth of capitalism, and that fighting one necessarily means fighting the other. At one point, she asked us to critique a case study about “Cecilia,” a community activist who spread a happy message of tolerance and mutual respect in her neighborhood. Cecilia’s approach was incomplete, the instructor informed us, because she neglected to sound the message that “classism is a form of oppression.” The real problem faced by visible minorities in our capitalist society isn’t a lack of understanding; “it’s the fundamentally inequitable nature of wage labor.”

  The central theme of the course was that this twinned combination of capitalism and racism has produced a cult of “white privilege,” which permeates every aspect of our lives. “Canada is a white supremacist country, so I assume that I’m racist,” one of the male students said matter-of-factly during our first session. “It’s not about not being racist. Because I know I am. It’s about becoming less racist.” At this, a woman told the class: “I hate when people tell me they’re color-blind. That is the most overt kind of racism. When people say, ‘I don’t see your race,’ I know that’s wrong. To ignore race is to be more racist than to acknowledge race. I call it neo-racism.”

  All of the students were white (to my eyes, anyway), and most said they’d come so they could integrate antiracism into their activism and community outreach efforts. A good deal of the course consisted of them unburdening themselves of their racist guilt. The instructor set the tone, describing an episode in which she lectured a junior black colleague about his job. “When I realized what I was doing, I approached him afterward and apologized,” she told the class. “I said to him, ‘I’m so sorry! I’m unloading so much whiteness on you right now.’ ”

  Another woman, an activist with an expertise in media arts, took the floor to describe her torment when a friend asked her to give a presentation to a group of black students—an exercise that would have made a spectacle of her white privilege. “Should I say yes? Or is it my responsibility to say no?” she said, quite literally wringing her hands with apprehension. “But then he may say, ‘I want you to do it—because you have a particular approach . . .’

  “But wait! Could it be that the reason I have that particular approach is that I’ve been raised to think that I could have that particular approach, that I have the ability, that I am able to access education in a particular way? All these things are in my head, in my heart, not really knowing how to respond. On the other hand, I also recognize that the person asking me has the agency to decide that I’m the right person . . . so I say yes! . . . But them I’m still thinking, ‘I don’t know if I did the right thing.’ I still struggle with this all the time . . .”

  An especially telling moment came when someone raised the subject of Filipino nannies who immigrate to Canada under government-sponsored caregiver programs. The instructor told the class that the practice was inherently “superexploitative” (a Marxist term that, according to Wikipedia, means “exploitation that goes beyond the normal standards of exploitation prevalent in capitalist society”). She also pointed us to an article included in the week’s reading, “Black Women and Work,” in which Canadian author Dionne Brand argues that cynical employers use appeals such as, “You know that you’re part of the family,” to emotionally blackmail nannies, housekeepers, and elder-care workers into the continuation of abusive work relationships.

  A community activist—I’ll call her Kelly—interjected, apologetically. While she was all on board with the general thrust of the Brand article, she couldn’t help but confess that her own family had employed a Filipino nanny who truly did seem “part of the family.” Kelly had been a flower girl at the nanny’s wedding, and became close friends with the nanny’s own children, who’d spent much of their lives in Kelly’s own house.

  This little speech from the heart—one of the rare instances in which someone had actually stepped outside the dogmas of antiracism and told a story in real, human language—caused a ripple of discomfort in the class. One woman suggested that the nanny has adopted a “coping mechanism” to deal with her subordinate situation. This led to a discussion about how we must recognize the nanny’s “agency”—a popular buzzword signifying that minority members must not be seen as passive victims. The instructor listened attentively—but couldn’t offer much more except that the example demonstrated the “contradictoriness” of antiracism studies. We moved on while Kelly just sat there, looking som
ewhat confused. I felt sorry for her.

  In fact, I felt sympathy for just about everyone in that class. Like communist die-hards confessing their counterrevolutionary thought-crimes at a Soviet workers’ council, or devout Catholics on their knees in the confessional, they were consumed by their sin, seeming to regard their pallor as a sort of moral leprosy. Their guilt was never far from the surface: Even basic communication with friends and fellow activists, I observed, was a plodding agony of self-censorship, in which every syllable was scrutinized for subconscious racist connotations as it was leaving their mouths. While politically correct campus activists often come across as smug and single-minded, their intellectual life might more accurately be described as bipolar—combining an ecstatic self-conception as high priestesses who pronounce upon the racist sins of our fallen society, alongside extravagant self-mortification in regard to their own fallen state.

  As cultural critics have been arguing for decades, the mindset I am describing betrays many of the hallmarks of totalitarianism: humorlessness, Orwellian neologisms, promiscuous accusations of thought-crimes, and the sanctification of doctrinal purity over candid emotional expression. But I also found it interesting to observe how closely this militant critique of society hewed to a traditional conspiracist narrative, which divides society between an elite, all-controlling oppressor class and everyone else. Or as Wilmot tells it: “In the blinding whiteness that controls our society—who gets what jobs, who is running the governments and business, who controls the media—the lives of people are generally erased.”