Among the Truthers

by Jonathan Kay

  Since Wilmot’s dogmas are rooted in communist logic, this aspect should not be surprising: As noted elsewhere in this book, Marxism is, in its broad contours, itself a form of conspiracy theory that pits evil industrialists against the common workingman. But the rise of militant antiracism in the 1980s and 1990s injected a fresh element into conspiracist culture: the notion that the evildoers aren’t Jews, or communists, or Bilderbergers, or aliens, or even capitalists—but rather ourselves. Under this politically correct, profoundly antipopulist form of conspiracism—which has found expression in not just radical antiracism, feminism, and anticapitalism, but a slew of more esoteric academic disciplines, such as postcolonial studies and queer theory—the very fabric of our society represents an invidious plot against anyone who doesn’t happen to be rich, white, male, and straight.

  The great irony is that all this was set in motion not by any of the epic crimes perpetrated by the white patriarchy (of which, let it be said, history records many), but by the civil rights movement and the legal and political victories that came in its wake. Once Western liberals launched themselves on the noble hunt for bald-faced bigotry, they expected to find their quarry everywhere—even once the hated creature had become virtually extinct.

  Lessons from the Yale Law Journal

  Yale University is a diverse place. When it comes to admissions, educational programs, and employment, the school claims in its official policy statements that it does not discriminate for or against any individual on the basis of race, color, or ethnic origin. But it’s widely known that Yale officials take whatever informal measures are required to increase the representation of minorities on campus. During my time at the law school in the mid–1990s, just under 10 percent of each year’s slots were assigned to African Americans—this, despite the fact that, as at other highly ranked U.S. law schools, few black applicants meet the school’s general standard for undergraduate grade-point averages and scores on the Law School Admission Test (LSAT).

  If the benefits of “diversity” are to be reaped anywhere, Yale Law School is the place. On some campuses, the ugliest aspect of affirmative action is that, by bringing in a population of less qualified students, it inevitably generates a racially stratified hierarchy of academic performance. At Yale Law School, on the other hand, classes are pass/fail affairs that, in practice, everybody passes. While it’s possible for students to earn an “honors” grade in their course work, the school’s culture actively discourages Paperchase-style competition. An aphorism frequently recited among the faculty in my day was that, once admitted to Yale, students were “off the treadmill.”

  But as my first year of law school wore on, it became clear that this was not quite true. Though grades count for less at Yale than at most schools, extracurricular activities count for more. The typical student has high ambitions. He does not merely dream of passing the local bar exam and joining a firm but rather aspires to become a judge, an academic, or a federal prosecutor—goals requiring, as a first step, the steady accumulation of accolades during one’s term at law school itself. These include, most notably, membership on the editorial staff of the prestigious Yale Law Journal.

  From the point of view of race relations, the Journal presents a problem. Under the rules in place during my time, applicants were required to complete a forty-eight-hour take-home exam testing their abilities in writing, editing, and the formatting of legal footnotes. The identities of the test-takers were unknown to the graders, and no accommodation was made for “underrepresented minorities.” Out of eighty-four white applicants in my year, fifty-two made the cut, as did five out of twelve Asians. Out of the seven black applicants, none was successful.

  This was not a one-time phenomenon. In the previous year’s competition, eleven blacks had applied, of whom only one was accepted. The result was that, overall, the editorial membership of the Journal was overwhelmingly white and Asian. Out of 113 members, only two were black.

  When these numbers were released, a scandal erupted. Journal officials convened a public meeting to discuss the problem, filling one of the law school’s biggest classrooms with a standing-room-only crowd that stayed for three hours. It was an angry meeting—and also an awkward one. The problem was that no one dared mention the most obvious explanation for the racial imbalance that everybody decried. To refer, even obliquely, to the race-tagged stratification of talent at the school would have been humiliating for black students. So instead we censored ourselves and invoked esoteric theories of racial exclusion. The most popular of these was that black applicants approached the writing component of the Journal exam with a special “black” style that was routinely and unfairly marked down by the test’s administrators. Some speakers argued that the test itself, like other such standardized exercises, amounted to a collection of culturally biased riddles. At the meeting, and in other campus discussions of the issue, many of my classmates folded their criticisms into a more general argument: the will of black applicants had been sapped by the “institutional racism” that allegedly pervaded Yale Law School.

  It was around this time that I began noticing a broadening social estrangement at the school along racial lines. Since the only way to explain the racial gap at the Law Journal while simultaneously preserving the academic dignity of black students was to endorse various theories of alienation, black students were encouraged to see signs of such alienation in the neo-Gothic law school’s every frieze and stained-glass medallion. A great deal was made of the absence of black “role models” on campus—especially black female role models. One of my fellow students argued in a public complaint that “in this environment, women students of color must fashion their professional personas out of thin air, because almost none of their professional mentors look anything like them.” Another lamented: “How can I think that my ideas are respected here when people who are just like me—black women—aren’t considered ‘good enough’ to teach here as full professors?”

  Much grist was provided by small incidents. When a study group ejected one of its members, a black student whose contributions apparently were subpar, the spurned member posted a J’accuse manifesto charging racism. In another supposed manifestation of “micro-racism” (as such phenomena would later be described by antiracism advocates), one of my classmates complained in an essay that she’d been “excluded and alienated from the classroom environment” by her criminal-law professor, who had unconscionably confined discussion about race to a three-week segment of the semester.

  In the classroom, certainly, the promised educational benefits of diversity rarely materialized. By promoting the idea that blacks thought and wrote in a special black style, the fallout from the Law Journal scandal reinforced the conceit that blacks and whites inhabit mutually impenetrable ideological worlds. Whites became increasingly reluctant to offer any comment that might be interpreted as threatening to blacks, while classroom comments by black students on any race-charged issue would almost always go unchallenged. Among my white peers, there was a feeling that sentiments expressed by black students had to be treated, in some abstract sense, as correct for blacks, and therefore immune from refutation. In general, most students were terrified of being accused of racism; when a subject connected to race came up, they either uttered platitudes or kept their mouths shut.

  What helped me understand the benign origins of this surreal, emperor-has-no-clothes hunt for racist phantasms was the actual substance of my coursework—and, in particular, my classes on constitutional law—in which much of the material focused on the great victories against the very real racism embedded in America’s legal framework until well into the 1960s, and arguably beyond that. (For instance, Loving v. Virginia, the U.S. Supreme Court case striking down Virginia’s antimiscegenation statute, was not decided until 1967.) The 1954 case of Brown v. Board of Education in particular, was taken as the ultimate touchstone of America’s moral redemption; just as its racist 1896 precedent, Plessy v. Ferguson—upholding the doctrine of “separate but equal
”—was taken as a byword for racist hypocrisy. Like everyone else in my class, I remember being genuinely moved by Brown and similar cases, and by the back-stories of the litigants who’d fought them. While most of us knew we were destined to become anonymous corporate lawyers and litigators in large law firms, the civil rights crusade launched by our professional forebears filled us with lawyerly pride. Thanks to them, blacks were living Martin Luther King’s dream of full racial equality, and overt racism had been pushed to the margins of American society. Armed with the same individual rights as the rest of us, we hoped and expected, blacks would quickly rise to the same level as their white neighbors.

  Except, three decades after King’s death, they hadn’t—not where it counted, anyway: in jobs, education, housing, earning power, crime, or any other index of socioeconomic success. The complex reasons for this lie beyond the scope of this book (and, in any case, are so commonly catalogued by America’s race-obsessed talking heads that I doubt anyone needs to hear them repeated, even in capsule form). But for the young and the idealistic, the fine points of gang culture, welfare-trap economics, and single parenthood were beside the point: Racism, we’d all learned in school, was America’s congenital disease. And the fact that blacks had not yet achieved full, practical equality meant it hadn’t yet been fully treated. It was not a question of whether America was racist—that fact was answered by the data. It was a question of how. And if the answer couldn’t be found in the plain language of laws and policy statements, it must somehow be lodged in hidden, even invisible, places, such as our own minds and words.

  It was this benign but misguided instinct, not any inherently totalitarian urge to control others, that gave birth to political correctness and the associated, increasingly conspiratorial witch hunt for racist phantasms within our souls. As illiberal as it seems, this conspiracist spirit is precious to those infused by it: Once one surrenders to it, all of the inequities in our society—between men and women, blacks and whites—can be chalked up to the familiar, reassuringly simplistic bogeyman of bigotry.

  Political correctness and radical identity politics have subsided slightly since their high-water mark in the early 1990s, in large part thanks to a backlash by right-wing culture warriors allied with principled leftist free-speechers. But like Marxism, it has left behind a toxic ideological residue on our intellectual coastline: a vague but powerful baseline belief among educated liberals that mainstream society is divided into victims and oppressors—and that the latter are largely white, male, straight middle-aged men who look a lot like George W. Bush and Donald Rumsfeld. After a few years spent wandering this coastline, the belief that these people might fly planes into the World Trade Center doesn’t follow automatically, but it certainly becomes a lot easier to assimilate.

  Chapter Nine

  The Protocols Revisited: The New Face of Anti-Semitic Conspiracism

  Showdown in the Bowery

  There’s an old joke about a lone Jewish sailor marooned on a tiny desert island in the middle of the South Pacific. After years of solitude, the castaway’s signal fire is spotted by the captain of a passing freighter, who wades ashore to rescue the man. Thereupon, the captain is astonished to find that the Jew has built himself not one, but two small mud-and-straw synagogues side by side.

  “Why two?” asks the captain.

  “That one is where I pray,” replies the Jew, gesturing solemnly to the synagogue on the left.

  “ . . . But as for that one,” he adds, raising a rueful finger at the other building, “I wouldn’t set foot in the place if you paid me.”

  That punch line neatly sums up the schismatic conspiracism on display over the weekend of September 11–13, 2009—the eighth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks—when lower Manhattan played host to not one, but two rival Truther conferences, just a few blocks from one another. Both events attracted hundreds of attendees, all convinced that the 9/11 attacks had been an inside job. Aside from that, the two groups had little in common.

  The first group—call them the right-wing New World Order faction—was young, loud, and libertarian. Under the banner of “We Are Change,” they staged “street actions” outside Madison Square Garden, the Council on Foreign Relations (where they screamed “We won’t be your New World Order slave puppets” to CFR president Richard Haass) and at Ground Zero itself. Their leader was Luke Rudkowski, a brooding twenty-three-year-old bullhorn activist (profiled in Chapter 5) who specializes in ambushing public figures on video with questions about 9/11. The most revered name on their lips was radio host Alex Jones; the most despised, the Bilderbergers (“scumbags trying to destroy humanity” was how one activist described them in a speech at Cooper Union). Everyone, it seemed, was carrying some form of digital camera, endlessly filming everyone else filming everyone else. Populism and patriotism were the binding ideological agents. Some of the speakers, in fact, were actual 9/11 first responders, former soldiers, and other uniformed types. Their speeches often were interrupted by chants of “U-S-A! U-S-A!”

  Meanwhile, at St. Mark’s Church in-the-Bowery, an entirely different conference was unfolding, this one under the banner of “We Demand Transparency: The Conference for Peace, Truth, and a New Economics.” Here, the attendees were older, grayer, quieter—tweedy academics and activists in sportjackets and tennis shoes, with one foot still planted in Cold War–era pacifism. There were few cameras. Unlike at We Are Change’s all-electronic right-wing jamboree, the people here were actually holding, reading, selling, and discussing old-fashioned books. These fathers and grandfathers did not go in for “street actions” or other noisy events. Instead, they sat in their pews and listened to a succession of wonky middle-aged men (they were all men) give Amerikan-themed history lessons about false flags, Vietnam, and the Bay of Pigs. The room was hot, and many of the attendees were clustered around the fans arrayed along the side walls. At a few points, I felt myself nodding off.

  Then, Kevin Barrett took the podium, and everyone woke up.

  Barrett is a balding, bespectacled man in his early fifties—the sort of fellow whose thumbnail photo might appear alongside the Yiddish-dictionary entry for nebbish. But from his base in Madison, Wisconsin, he’s made a name for himself in Truther circles as one of the movement’s say-anything bad boys. Born into a conventional midwestern Lutheran family (his father was Olympic gold-medal sailor Peter Barrett), Barrett converted to Islam in 1992, after marrying a Moroccan-born Muslim woman. Five years later, he earned a PhD in African languages and literature at the University of Wisconsin, where he remained employed as a lecturer until he created an uproar by publicly insisting that Muslims weren’t involved in the World Trade Center attacks. (“Every single Muslim I know in Madison knew it was an inside job.”) Since then, he’s been arrested for alleged domestic abuse, run a fringe campaign for Congress, hosted conspiracist radio programs, launched a series of ugly feuds with competing conspiracists, and started up a creepy website that publishes the home addresses of police officers and other government officials “who are alleged to have seriously abused their power over others.”

  Barrett began his presentation at St. Mark’s by arguing that the involvement of Muslims in the 9/11 operation would be an impossibility, since the tenets of Islam are incompatible with any sort of unprovoked violence. Instead, he said, the obvious villain is Israel—or, as he called it, the “genocidal settler colonial state in Palestine.” But making this case to the American people is difficult, he said, because Jews are “wildly overrepresented in the American media,” and all the major media companies are led by “Zionist Jewish CEOs.” Nor can we trust the official 9/11 commission, Barrett says, since its executive director, Philip Zelikow, is an “ethnic Jew.”

  None of these claims would have been particularly surprising for anyone who’d studied Barrett’s comments about Jews and Israel, in which he often recycles traditional anti-Semitic propaganda themes, as in this mass emailing addressing the Lebanese government’s discrimination against Palestinians: “Th
e hundreds of thousands of [Palestinian] refugees living in poverty in Lebanon, among other places, should be treated as honored guests; while the economic losses that ordinary Lebanese will suffer when the Palestinians compete with them in the work force, and all other losses suffered by the victims of Zionism, should be compensated ASAP by the seizure of Zionist money, starting with the Rothschild fortune along with those of the other 50% of American billionaires who are Zionist war criminals.”

  And it gets worse. Since leaving the University of Wisconsin, Barrett has become that rare breed: a left-wing Holocaust skeptic. Back in 2006, he described his views on the subject this way: “Whatever the facts about WWII, it seems tragic that systematic Zionist Big Lies [about the Middle East] have cast legitimate doubt upon ANYTHING Jews say about Jews and their recent history, including the Holocaust. As a rational person who is not a specialist in the subject of WWII, but who has studied the history of Zionist Big Lies vis-à-vis Palestine, I cannot possibly dismiss the arguments of people like [Mark] Green, [David] Irving, and even [Ernst] Zündel. And even if the 6-million-deliberately-murdered-for-purely-ethnic-reasons figure is correct—which it very well may be; I have grown agnostic on that after studying the Big Lies of Zionism—I would still have to characterize the Holocaust as it is taught in the U.S. as a hideously destructive myth.”

  As Barrett spoke, there was an uncomfortable stir in the crowd. One particular fellow—a middle-aged Truther with a boyish face and a shaggy 1970s-style mop of brown hair, seated about twenty feet to my right—could barely contain his exasperation. Later on, he identified himself to me as Steve Alten, a science-fiction author best known for his Meg action novels about a family of giant prehistoric sharks (the megalodon) that eat boats, helicopters, whales, and (in historical flashback) a Tyrannosaurus Rex.