Among the Truthers

Jonathan Kay

• Publisher: HarperCollins e-books
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9780062079343
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Theory
• Index: Social Sciences

From 9/11 conspiracy theorists and UFO obsessives tothe cult of Ayn Rand and Birthercrusaders, America is suffering from an explosion in post-rationalistideological movements. In Among the Truthers, journalist Jonathan Kay offers a thoughtful and sobering look at how socialnetworking and Web-based video sharing have engendered a flourishing of new conspiracism. Kay details the sociological profiles of tenbrands of modern conspiracists—the Failed Historian, the Mid-Life Crack-Up, the Damaged Survivor, the Campus Revolutionary, theStoner, the Clinical Case, the Puzzle Solver, the Christian Doomsayer, the CosmicVoyager, and the Egomaniac—in a compelling exploration of America's departurefrom reason and what it means for the very future of rational discourse as thenation steps further into the 21 st century.

Part I
The Truth Movement and Its Ancestors

Chapter One
American Conspiracism: A Brief History

I worked for them . . . I took a position with a group of multinationals we call “The Company.” They call every shot this country takes. What laws to pass. What judges to appoint. What wars to fight. The thing is—if you want to rise in the ranks like I did, you had to commit to leaving everything you knew behind. Because then you start to get access to the real information . . . information that people would do a lot of things to get their hands on—like harm your family.

—Prison Break, Season 1, Episode 19, “The Key”

I know I’m hardly the first one to decide I have had all I can stand. It has always been a myth that people have stopped dying for their freedom in this country, and it isn’t limited to the blacks, and poor immigrants. I know there have been countless before me and there are sure to be as many after. But I also know that by not adding my body to the count, I insure nothing will change. I choose to not keep looking over my shoulder at “big brother” while he strips my carcass, I choose not to ignore what is going on all around me, I choose not to pretend that business as usual won’t continue; I have just had enough.

—Suicide manifesto left by Joseph Stack, who crashed a single-engine plane into an Austin, Texas, building housing IRS offices on February 18, 2010

Programmed for Conspiracy

In the late 1990s, University of Michigan developmental psychologist Margaret Evans became interested in the question of why many Americans doubted the notion of biological evolution. So she began interviewing children of different ages and religious backgrounds about where they thought animals originated.

The responses she got, analyzed in a 2000 academic journal article, revealed an interesting pattern. The youngest subjects, aged four to seven, gave a range of answers—most along the lines of “from someplace else” or “out of the ground.” But among eight-to-ten year olds, the responses were different: “Whatever their family background, most children in this age range endorse the idea that the first kinds of animals were ‘made by someone,’ and often that someone is God.” Only in later years, as children developed the ability for complex, abstract thought, were they able to process the idea of evolutionary change.

Obviously, this reflects the fact that evolution is a complicated scientific concept. But Evans and other researchers believe there is more to it than that: From a young age, human brains seem programmed to see design and intention behind the world around them.

When asked about lions, children tell social science researchers that they exist so we can see them in the zoo. When asked why some rocks are pointy, children will respond: “so that animals won’t sit on them.” No less a thinker than Aristotle theorized that rocks fell downward so that they could take their natural place in the world. Only in the centuries since the Enlightenment has this outlook been systematically challenged. And even now, it continues to have its defenders—the campaign for “Intelligent Design” as an alternative to random genetic mutation and natural selection being the most prominent example.

Michael Shermer, the editor of Skeptic magazine, and executive director of the Skeptics Society, calls this mode of thinking “agenticity”—“the tendency to believe that the world is controlled by intentional agents, usually invisible, from the top down . . . souls, spirits, ghosts, gods, demons, angels, aliens, intelligent designers, and government conspiracies are all believed to haunt our world and control our lives . . . It even informs our [modern] belief in government.”

How does this thinking evolve? The same way our bodies did.

“Picture yourself in the Neolithic environment of our evolutionary adaptation, and you’re a hominid walking along and you hear a rustle in the grass,” says Shermer. “Is it a dangerous predator or just the wind? Well, if you believed it was a predator, but it was just the wind, you’ve made a [false positive] error. But no problem—no big deal. On the other hand, if you believe the rustle in the grass was just the wind, and it’s actually a dangerous predator, you’re lunch. And so there’s a high cost to making a [false negative] error. [Thus,] our default position is just to assume that all patterns are real. This is the evolution of ‘patternicity’ or superstition. There’s been a natural selection in our cognitive processes of assuming that all patterns are real important phenomena. And we’re the descendants of the most successful patternicity primates.”

At the societal level, the “agenticity” and “patternicity” Shermer describes have shaped the foundational myths that humans develop to infuse meaning into life: We take comfort from the idea that the randomness of human life, with all the attendant sorrows and catastrophes, is actually part of some master plan created by a (usually) unseen higher power. In the Western literary tradition, the prototype was Odysseus, a long-suffering pawn in a feud between the protective Athena and the malicious Poseidon. Aeneas was buffeted by similar divine intrigues on his way to founding Rome. Indeed, the whole arc of Greco-Roman mythology, and even the Bible stories that replaced it, is premised on the idea that human events are guided by mysterious supernatural agents—conspiracy theories in robes and sandals.

In many cases, this conspiracist reflex has blended with tribalism, the human instinct that causes us to rally around our own kin groups, and demonize outsiders—especially during times of conflict or crisis. The most venerable example is the blood libel against Jews that periodically gained a following in medieval European societies (and still pops up in Muslim countries), according to which Jews were accused of killing gentile children and using their blood for the production of their Passover matzos. Such anti-Semitic conspiracy theories have been around in recognizable form since at least the time of the Crusades, when bellicosity toward Muslims morphed into a more general form of religious xenophobia.

The Crusades also led to a second and distinct form of conspiracism—one directed toward the Knights Templar and similarly secretive groups of monk-warriors. While these holy legions originally were organized to fight in the Middle East, they eventually set up banks and commercial networks, and exerted a sometimes malign influence on domestic affairs. As Daniel Pipes wrote in his 1997 book Conspiracy: How The Paranoid Style Flourishes And Where It Comes From, the Knights Templar “had a conspiratorial air about them . . . At the initiation ceremony, a candidate was told that ‘of our order you only see the surface which is the outside,’ implying that something very secret took place behind closed doors. At the end of the initiation, each knight kissed the adept on the mouth, an act with obvious homosexual overtones . . . Together, the spectacular rise, great power, and grisly end of the Templars [at the hands of King Philip IV of France] turned them into a permanent feature of European conspiracy theories.”

By modern standards, these theories were simple narratives—folk tales for peasants—that purported to describe finite, localized plots against this or that monarch or town. But this began to change in the eighteenth century, as capitalism, industrialization, and urbanization transformed Europe. The French Revolution, in particular, demonstrated that a relatively small group of ideologically motivated radicals, armed with a universalist creed, could propel a state, and possibly even a whole continent, into mass upheaval. “If French fears from 1725 of a ‘famine plot’ to starve the country symbolize conspiracy theories before the French Revolution—a limited scheme aimed at monetary gain—fears after 1789 are captured by a supposed . . . plot to eliminate the monarchy, the church, and private property,” wrote Pipes. “Just as the conspirators grew far more alarming, so did their goals—and the theories about them.”

It is no coincidence that conspiracism took its modern form at the same time Edmund Burke was writing Reflections on the Revolution in France, which many historians identify as the original manifesto of conservative thought. Like the conspiracist creeds of the era, Burke’s influential ideology was rooted in a nostalgia—or at least a respect—for the old order, and a (justified) fear that the revolutionary, abstract doctrines animating Europe would lead to tyranny and chaos.

The Freemasons and Jews figured prominently in conspiracy theories about the French Revolution that emerged in the early nineteenth century. But there was a new villain, as well—the Order of the Illuminati, a secret society founded on the precepts of humanitarian rationalism by an eccentric Bavarian law professor in 1776. Unlike the benign Masons, the Illuminati operated as a genuine cult, imposing secret rites on members, and forbidding interaction with outside society. Though the group would fizzle within a decade, and had only a few thousand members at its height, it remains an enduring fixation among conspiracists—including novelist Dan Brown, who put a lurid pseudo-Illuminati plot to destroy Vatican City at the center of his 2000 book, Angels & Demons.

Even before the French Revolution, the Marquis de Luchet warned Europe that the Illuminati aimed to “govern the world.” Later on, in 1797, Scottish conspiracist John Robison wrote that the Illuminati had been formed “for the express purpose of rooting out all the religious establishments, and overturning all the existing governments of Europe.” A year later, Augustin Barruel gave the Illuminati a starring role in his four-volume work Memoirs Illustrating the History of Jacobinism—in which he argued that the French Revolution resulted from a “triple conspiracy” of Freemasons, Illuminati, and anti-Christians who aimed at achieving the “overthrow of the altar, the ruin of the throne, and the dissolution of all civil society.” His list of conspirators included many of the greatest minds of the Enlightenment, including Voltaire, whom Barruel imagines to be the French Revolution’s true architect.

Foreshadowing the New World Order paranoia of the John Birch Society and other twentieth-century conspiracist groups, Barruel warned of a godless world republic that would be built on the ashes of the Vatican and the world’s royal palaces. Within a few years, these dark rhapsodies were co-opted wholesale by anti-Semites (who simply replaced “Illuminati” with “Jews” in their propaganda), and would become the dominant theme of the anti-Semitic literature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—including The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, whose enormous influence on modern conspiracism will be discussed in detail in Chapter 2.

During the twentieth century, conspiracism became the animating creed at both extremes of Europe’s political spectrum.

On the Far Right, fascists idealized the notion of a single-party state, infused with a single collective cultural identity, and launched murderous propaganda campaigns against any group that stood accused of thwarting this monolithic agenda. Adolf Hitler took this view to its defining extreme, basing his entire political philosophy on a delusional fear that Jews were conspiring to destroy not only the Aryan nation, but all of humanity. “Should the Jew, with the aid of his Marxist creed, triumph over the people of this world, his Crown will be the funeral wreath of mankind, and this planet will once again follow its orbit through ether, without any human life on its surface, as it did millions of years ago,” he wrote in Mein Kampf. “And so I believe today that my conduct is in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator. In standing guard against the Jew I am defending the handiwork of the Lord.”

But conspiracism put down strong roots on the Far Left, too—fed both by Soviet propaganda about the United States, and the inherent nature of radical left-wing ideology, which presents capitalists as scheming parasites seeking to rob the proletariat of the value of their labor. Or as Marx himself put it in Das Kapital: “Within the capitalist system, all methods for raising the social productivity of labour are put into effect at the cost of the individual worker; all means for the development of production undergo a dialectical inversion so that they become means of domination and exploitation of the producers; they distort the worker into a fragment of a man.” (This aspect of Marxism helps explain why former Marxist radicals so easily leap to other militant creeds, such as fascism, Islamism, or—as with WorldNetDaily editor Joseph Farah, profiled later in this book—ultrapopulist conservatism. Notwithstanding the numbing jargon about Hegelian dialectics and such, the real lure of Marxism for these ideologues is its fundamentally conspiracist vision of society.)

In the United States, where neither Marxism nor fascism ever became truly mass movements, conspiracism followed a different and more complicated pattern—one rooted in three intertwined influences.

First was America’s religious tradition of apocalyptic millenarianism—a subject discussed in more detail in Chapter 4, in the specific context of Christian conservative conspiracy theories involving Barack Obama. It is a tradition that dates back to New England’s witch hunts and the “Beast-watching” early Puritans, who linked the seven-headed beast of Revelation 13 with the Catholic Church and, later on, the British Empire. Many American conspiracists hitched their appeal to this Revelation-inspired vision of End Times, assigning the various roles of False Prophet, Antichrist, and Satan to popery, the Elders of Zion, the USSR, Nazi Germany, secular humanism, a “New World Order,” or neoconservatism. The United Nations, which the rest of the civilized world tends to regard as a largely benign (if incompetent) organization, is an especially popular target: In the best-selling Left Behind series of novels, which portray earth in the agonies of the Rapture, the Antichrist figure takes the form of UN Secretary General “Nicolae Carpathia” (so-named, social critic Charles Pierce has quipped, “because the authors didn’t think of calling him ‘Evil J. Transylvania’ ”). According to this vision, the political battle for America is in fact a battle for the cosmos itself—with the conspiracists assigning to themselves the role of enlightened Prophets.

The second major influence on American conspiracism is the country’s unique political culture. From early on in the nation’s history (before it even became a nation, in fact), Americans viewed the United States as a land of economic and political freedom—a place where sturdy, independent yeomen could make their way in the world without much help from government or entanglement with their neighbors. This muscular, independent attitude extended into the realm of philosophy: Born amid the Enlightenment, with its emphasis on individual reason unfettered by authority, America produced a lively culture of homegrown inventors and scientists. As time would tell, it was also more hospitable than the nations of Europe to intellectual outsiders—oddballs, dissidents, heretics, fussy autodidacts, and skeptics—the sort of men who we would now call “cranks.”

But this worldview sowed the seeds of its own destruction. Unfettered American capitalism in the nineteenth century permitted a concentration of economic power in a small handful of banks and conglomerates, whose abuses summoned into being a populist backlash, which in turn spurred the creation of an intrusive regulatory state. Meanwhile, on the international stage, America became liberty’s defender of last resort in the face of the Soviet threat—a campaign that ultimately was successful, but only through the empowerment of what Dwight Eisenhower called the “military-industrial complex.” The combined result was a country where the ideals of liberty conflicted with a reality in which power became concentrated in the hands of large, faceless corporate and governmental organizations whose very existence seemed a malign affront to the open character of America’s early years.

The third major influence on the development of American conspiracism was technology. In the early and mid-twentieth century, in particular, Americans were confronted with a range of powerful new machines—from mass communications, to invasive medical imaging, to space travel, to nuclear energy—that were controlled by a new class of menacing technocrats. Thanks to America’s massive wealth in the postwar years, the pace of progress was much faster than in other developed nations. While the new technologies improved the material lives of most Americans, they also increased their dependence on the government and large corporations, thereby increasing the scope for mass paranoia.

It is out of this three-part mix—religious apocalypticism, political populism, and rapid technological advancement—that America’s unique brand of conspiracism emerged. I call the resulting pastiche “flowchart conspiracism”—because its trademark feature is the imagining of a complex organizational chart linking all of America’s power centers, from media companies to drug makers to the CIA, to one central, all-controlling secular Antichrist.

Populism and Paranoia: How Politics Shaped American Conspiracism

From the Populist movement of the late nineteenth century, to the KKK, to the backlash against FDR’s New Deal, to McCarthyism, the militia movement, Ross Perot, the films of Michael Moore, and the red-state rhetoric of Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck, and Lou Dobbs, American conspiracism has reflected a consistent political theme: Some cabal of coastal political elites, Ivy league intellectuals, “bankers” (sometimes, but not always, a code word for Jews), and corporate oligopolists are conspiring to sell out the nation’s ordinary, hardscrabble working people. As I was reminded by a sixteen-year-old Minnesotan Truther whom I heard fulminating in New York City against “a tyrannical government and their oppressive regime of bankers, front men, and puppets” and “thieves who take our hard-earned money and ship it off to foreigners,” much of the modern conspiracist mindset, and even its terminology, remains frozen in place from the Jacksonian movement of the early nineteenth century.

If conspiracism may be seen as a collective ailment, then the United States was infected at birth: British colonial rule under ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction: Stumbling on the Truthers
• Part I - The Truth Movement and Its Ancestors
• Part II - Meet the Truthers
• Part III - Accessories to Trutherdom
• Index
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author
• Credits
• Copyright
• About the Publisher