The United States of Paranoia

by Jesse Walker

  Instead, the bulk of the increase took place under Bush, not Obama, with a peak during the 2007–2008 election season. Perliger argued that this is part of a broader pattern in which “presidential election years and the preceding year are characterized by an increase of far-right violence,” and he suggested that the increase in 2011 might represent the same cycle repeating itself.50

  What happens if you take out the white supremacists, the antiabortion killers, and so on, and just stick to the people Perliger called the “anti-federalist movement”—militias, sovereign citizens, and others opposed to the concentration of power in Washington? Then his data did show a brief spike in 2010. Usually, he reported, there are about one to four violent incidents involving antifederalists each year. In 2010, the number jumped to thirteen. The next year, it dropped back down to two. Contrast those figures with the Southern Poverty Law Center’s warnings that the number of patriot groups has been growing since 2008, and you’ll see another reason not to treat the SPLC’s count as a proxy for the threat of political violence.

  The backdrop to all this fear of the right was the rise of the Tea Party movement, a surge in conservative and libertarian activism against new federal interventions in the economy. Some Tea Partiers were prone to conspiracy theories of their own, from the claim that Obama’s health care bill would establish “death panels” to the familiar charge that FEMA was preparing internment camps. Discussions of the movement frequently highlighted such theories, often arguing that they proved the Right had “gone crazy” since the Democrats had retaken the White House.

  On the face of it, that was an odd argument to make. When George W. Bush was in office, there was no shortage of conspiracy theories on the right; it’s just that they tended to be aimed at foreigners, Muslims, and the left-wing opposition rather than the White House. On the paramilitary right, the social space once occupied by the government-fearing militia movement was filled in Bushtime by the illegal immigrant–fearing Minuteman movement, which organized patrols of the U.S.-Mexico border. (This is not the same group as the anti-Communist Minutemen of the 1960s.) As the Tea Party movement rose, the faction-prone Minutemen continued to fracture and the militias began to grow again.51 Broadly speaking, the grassroots Right of 2009 was more libertarian than the grassroots Right of five years earlier, so its conspiracy theories were more likely to involve the Enemy Above. But it is far from clear that the Right was more prone to conspiracy theories in general. It merely pointed many of those theories in a different direction.

  That said, the most notable right-wing conspiracy theory of the period was not particularly libertarian. I refer to the idea that Barack Obama and his allies are covering up the true circumstances of the president’s birth. The exact details of the story vary from theorist to theorist, but the usual payoff is that Obama was born in Kenya, not Hawaii, and therefore is ineligible for the presidency.

  By mid-2009 the birthers, as they became known, threatened to replace the truthers as the media’s favorite emblem of political paranoia.52 The radio and TV hosts Lou Dobbs and Glenn Beck gave their thesis a sympathetic hearing, and in July, ten House Republicans cosponsored a birther-backed bill that would require prospective presidential candidates to release their birth certificates before running. The obsession didn’t diminish until the president released his original long-form birth certificate in April 2011, and even then the story still circulated among some die-hard clue hunters.

  At least three significant motives ran through the birther milieu, each inflaming different (though sometimes overlapping) groups.

  Wishing for a magic bullet. This is the most obvious motivation: the search for a bolt of lightning that would end Obama’s career without the pain of political persuasion. Birtherism was born not in the GOP but during the 2008 Democratic primaries, when Hillary Clinton’s supporters started wishing for a miracle that would remove her chief rival for the nomination. After Clinton left the race, the theory continued to attract new believers, but suddenly they hailed from the right, because that’s where Obama’s new foes were to be found. First came the political need, then came the belief. If you went to a birther convention in 2009, one pair of sentences you would almost certainly not hear was “I strongly support Obama’s ideas about economic stimulus and health care reform. It’s just too bad he’s ineligible to be president.”

  Fear of foreign influence. For many birthers, Obama’s origins were bound up with a general suspicion of the foreign. It’s no surprise that the highest-profile media figure to give their arguments a friendly venue was Lou Dobbs, at the time a fiercely protectionist and anti-immigrant voice. Discussing Obama’s birth certificate on his radio show, Dobbs declared that he was “starting to think we have a, we have a document issue. You suppose he’s un— No, I won’t even use the word undocumented. It wouldn’t be right.”53

  He was making a pun. I assume that Dobbs didn’t actually believe that Obama is an illegal alien. But jokes have meanings, and Dobbs—perhaps intuitively, perhaps by design—was bringing an implicit link into the open: the connection between the fear of foreign settlers and the fear of a foreign president.

  Where Dobbs will only joke and wink, others spoke in earnest. Later that month, on the cable show Hardball, the old Watergate hand G. Gordon Liddy was asked what Obama would be if he had been born abroad and never naturalized. “An illegal alien,” Liddy replied.54

  While the obvious anxiety here involves the influx of immigrants from Mexico, that wasn’t the only factor at work. It isn’t a big leap from the fear of foreign Muslims to the fear that a powerful figure is covertly foreign and/or Muslim. (In addition to the birther theories, Obama has been plagued by rumors that he secretly subscribes to Islam.) And there was already plenty in Obama’s biography to fan nativist anxieties about the Enemy Outside. He spent a chunk of his childhood in Indonesia. His father came from Kenya. When young Obama did live in the United States, he was in Hawaii, the one American state that isn’t actually a part of the Americas. If you don’t conceive of the United States as a multicultural nation, the president’s life is reason enough to consider the man metaphorically foreign. And if there’s one thing conspiracy theories are good at, it’s transmuting the metaphorical into the real.

  Excessive reverence. In a perverse way, birtherism is the flip side of Obama’s fervent fan base: It’s a way to keep your respect for the Oval Office intact while hating the man who occupies it. In his 2008 book The Cult of the Presidency, Gene Healy noted that although trust in our presidents has declined since Watergate, “the inflated expectations people have for the office—what they want from a president—remain as high as ever. . . . From popular culture to the academy to the voting booth, we curse the king, all the while pining for Camelot.”55

  What happens when someone who reveres the presidency despises the president? In the past you might, say, denounce Bill Clinton as a “stain” on the institution, thus mentally separating office from officeholder. But if you can challenge the president’s legitimacy entirely, that’s all the more satisfying. The throne is still the throne; it’s just that the man sitting in it is a pretender.

  I can’t claim credit for that metaphor. Surf through the birther hangouts online, and you’ll see a lot of semiroyalist rhetoric on display. One writer declared that “when Barack Obama officially entered the office of President, he became, in essence, a ‘pretender to the throne.’ ”56 Another called him “our present Pretender to the Presidency.”57 Another suggested that the man might be a “usurper.”58 Yet another, mixing monarchist and nativist rhetoric, jumped from describing Obama as “the quasi-Muslim, marginal American in the White House” to calling him—yes—“almost certainly a Pretender to the Throne.”59

  Birtherism wasn’t just paranoid in itself. It fed the paranoid narrative about “rising right-wing violence,” as when Heidi Beirich of the Southern Poverty Law Center told NPR that birther-style theories might presage another Oklahoma City bombing.60

  To hear some people t
ell it, just about anything might presage another Oklahoma City bombing. On January 8, 2011, a young man named Jared Lee Loughner attempted to assassinate Representative Gabrielle Giffords of Arizona in a parking lot near Tucson. She survived, but he killed six others in the process. The airwaves and Internet were quickly clogged with claims that Loughner had been incited by talk radio, by violent political imagery, by right-wing conspiracy theories, even by a map the former vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin had released during the 2010 elections, in which the congressional districts that she was targeting (including Giffords’s) were illustrated with crosshairs icons. Right after the shooting, Markos Moulitsas of The Daily Kos tweeted: “Mission accomplished, Sarah Palin.”61 Michael Daly of the New York Daily News wrote that “now that Palin may have the blood of more than some poor caribou on her hands, I wonder if she will continue putting people in cross hairs and calling on folks to RELOAD!”62 An article in The Guardian strained very hard to find traces of the Tea Party movement in Loughner’s YouTube videos, at one point noting that “The US constitution, the bible of the Tea Parties, features heavily.”63

  The narrative fell apart when Loughner’s actual worldview began to emerge. Instead of revealing a passion for Tea Party politics or an interest in Sarah Palin’s PAC, the texts and videos the killer posted on the Internet advocated an “infinite source of currency,”64 warned that the government is using grammar to control people’s minds, and expressed what one journalist described delicately as “indecipherable theories about the calendar date.”65 Here is a typical Loughner passage:

  If I define sleepwalking then sleepwalking is the act or state of walking, eating, or performing other motor acts while asleep, of which one is unaware upon awakening.

  I define sleepwalking.

  Thus, sleepwalking is the act or state of walking, eating, or performing other motor acts while asleep, of which one is unaware upon awakening.

  I’m a sleepwalker—who turns off the alarm clock.66

  Even then, there was some confusion about just what forms of crankery were influencing Loughner. Mark Potok, for example, wrote a day after the shootings that it was “pretty clear that Loughner is taking ideas from Patriot conspiracy theorist David Wynn Miller of Milwaukee,” a claim that has yet to yield any substantive supporting evidence.67

  Loughner’s friend Zach Osler provided a more useful clue when he told ABC that the killer wasn’t interested in mainstream political debates and that he was a fan instead of Peter Joseph’s 2007 documentary Zeitgeist. Joseph’s movie is one-third arguments that religion is a fraud, one-third trutherism, and one-third conspiracy theories about bankers. Its online study guide cites a rainbow coalition of sources—libertarians, leftists, Birchers, even a cameo by Lyndon LaRouche—and the results do not easily fit the label left or right. In 2009, Joseph founded a full-blown Zeitgeist Movement, with a platform heavy on futurism, sustainability, and utopian economics. There’s no sign that Loughner’s love of the Zeitgeist movie extended into a love of the Zeitgeist Movement. That isn’t likely, given that Joseph now calls not for a new currency but for the abolition of money altogether. Whatever Loughner got out of the video is obviously just one element of his worldview.

  Loughner was also interested, for example, in lucid dreaming, in reality-bending movies such as Richard Linklater’s Waking Life (2001) and Richard Kelly’s Donnie Darko (2001), and in the science fiction novels of Philip K. Dick, a writer whose paranoid plots often hinge on the idea that reality itself is a fraud. Another friend of Loughner, Bryce Tierney, told Mother Jones that the shooter was “fascinated” with the idea that “the world is really nothing—illusion.”68

  Interviewed by MSNBC on the day of the shooting, Potok gamely tried to link lucid dreaming to the radical Right, noting that the conspiracy theorist David Icke is interested in the subject. A much more plausible hypothesis—but still just a hypothesis—is that Loughner’s interest in alternate realities was at the core of his worldview and that he was attracted to those elements of fringe politics that seemed to reinforce his suspicion that the waking world is a lie.

  Not that this in itself would be enough to drive a man to murder. Many, many people have been playing with those ideas recently, and most of them do not try to kill anyone.

  In the late 1990s and early 2000s, a wave of cult movies drew on the most extreme form of the Enemy Within story—the narrative where life is a masquerade and what we experience as reality is a false and perhaps malevolent illusion. The idea wasn’t new, but suddenly it was everywhere: in The Truman Show (1998), Dark City (1998), The Matrix (1999), the Canadian eXistenZ (1999), The Thirteenth Floor (1999), the TV series Harsh Realm (1999–2000), Vanilla Sky (2001), and other motion pictures.69 The broader idea of prowling about in a virtual world, possibly located in someone else’s head, turned up in still more pictures, from What Dreams May Come (1998) to Being John Malkovich (1999) to The Cell (2000) to one of Loughner’s favorites, Waking Life.

  You can credit part of this glut to imitation. But too many of the projects were created simultaneously and independently for that to explain everything. For whatever reasons, audiences at the turn of the twenty-first century were receptive to paranoid thrillers about inauthentic realities. Call it the Demiurge cycle, after the Gnostic notion that our world is governed by a mad ersatz God.

  The most influential of the Demiurge films was The Matrix, an extremely popular picture written and directed by Andy and Larry (later Lana) Wachowski. It told the story of Neo, a computer programmer played by Keanu Reeves who learns that our world is just a simulation, something to occupy our minds while we live in tiny pods and malevolent machines harvest our bioelectrical energy. The Matrix and its two sequels could pass as a capsule history of baby-boom rock. The first film is a three-chord riff of a movie: a simple, familiar idea—“What if reality is a great big fake?”—amplified and transformed into an irresistible hook. The Matrix Reloaded (2003) is a 1970s prog-rock concept album: sprawling, pretentious, and ultimately incoherent, but brimming with ideas and virtuoso displays. And The Matrix: Revolutions (2003) is an over-the-hill pop star recycling someone else’s material: the sort of music you’d hear on a Michelob commercial, circa 1987.

  The Demiurge genre didn’t die when the Matrix trilogy ended—Inception, the most notable recent specimen, was a critical and commercial success in 2010—but Revolutions did signal that the boom was coming to a close. Unlike its two predecessors, Revolutions barely bothers to engage the idea that set the Matrix series in motion. No longer trapped in a false world devised by an evil intelligence, the heroes are now trapped in an anthology of war movie clichés; no longer skeptical and alienated, they proclaim the tritest sort of faith. When critics comment on the Demiurge cycle, they often cite Philip K. Dick as its patron saint. There is no trace of Dick in The Matrix: Revolutions.70

  If the king of the world builders was J. R. R. Tolkien—the man who devoted so much of his life to creating the Middle-Earth of The Lord of the Rings, complete with an elaborate philology of his imaginary languages—then Dick was the fellow who confessed, in an essay called “How to Build a Universe That Doesn’t Fall Apart Two Days Later,” that he liked “to build universes that do fall apart. I like to see them come unglued, and I like to see how the characters in the novels cope with this problem.”71 In a Dick story, true as well as false realities threaten to crumble away, and false as well as true realities are waiting to be discovered.72

  Only a few entries in the Demiurge cycle, notably eXistenZ and Being John Malkovich, take things that far. As a result, most of them never acknowledge a curious social fact that lurked in the background while they flickered on our Cineplex screens. In a Demiurge movie, either the protagonist or the whole world is trapped in an alternate universe of someone else’s making. Yet the films became popular as more and more people were willingly immersing themselves in ever more elaborate alternate universes, many of which they had helped to build.

  The paradox at the heart of the
Matrix movies is that a story about people struggling to free themselves from an imaginary world should evolve into an imaginary world that millions of people are eager to enter. You can become a Matrix character by playing a best-selling video game; you can explore the Matrix universe by playing a collaborative online puzzle game; you can build unauthorized add-ons to that universe by devising your own Matrix parody or fan fiction. People might not like to be forced or tricked into a false world. Evidently, though, they’ll jump at the opportunity to enter and exit one at will.

  That brings us back to the hunt for clues. The Web, multiplayer computer games, and fan communities are not merely places where people adopt or construct their own fake realities; they are places where those realities bump against one another in unpredictable ways, leaving trails to entice or confuse the devoted clue hunter.

  Look at what happened when music lovers across England mourned the death of Jamie Kane, the scandal-tinged veteran of the boy band Boy*d Upp whose solo career was, to quote Wikipedia, “mildly successful.”73 He was killed in a helicopter crash en route to a video shoot in 2005; the BBC’s Top of the Pops website reported that Kane’s aircraft “experienced some technical difficulties on the flight, and crashed into the sea some miles from its destination.”74 Some suspected foul play.

  Nearly everything in the previous paragraph is untrue. There never was a boy band called Boy*d Upp, there never was a pop star named Jamie Kane, he never faced a scandal, he never died, and no one ever mourned him. The BBC did report his death, though, and an outline of his alleged career did surface briefly in Wikipedia. And when people realized that those fictions were appearing in venues theoretically devoted to fact, the whiff of foul play did waft through the air.