Among the Truthers (24 page)

McLuhan's obsession with book reviewers is telling, since many mainstream intellectuals get pushed into crankdom by the conviction that they are being unfairly ignored or disparaged by their peers. In the current age, liberal arts professors who have spent their careers laboring in fusty academic obscurity, in particular, find they are able to become instant YouTube superstars merely by adding some sensational twist on an established conspiracy movement—all without having to go through the lengthy, frustrating process of legitimate peer review.

“If you look at a lot of the leading characters in the [9/11 Truth]movement, they tend to be people who are smart but never really got to the top [in their field],” says James Bennett, one of the cocreators of the well-traveled anti-Truther blog
Screw Loose Change
. “Look at [former Brigham Young University physicist] Steven Jones. He had his brush with fame [in the mid-80s] with cold fusion. But it didn't pan out. And it became a miniscandal in the scientific community. He
almost
accomplished something. But now he's in the Truth movement. He's lauded by thousands. He gives speeches. People talk about him in the same breath as Gandhi and Jesus.”

Even when the crank is ignored or shunned, he derives satisfaction from the sense that he possesses secret truths about the world that ordinary people are too cowardly to accept. “Throughout the fringe movements that I've seen—whether it's the 9/11 Truth movement, or New Age theories, or Holocaust revisionism—the people tend to have something in common: They think they're smarter than the average person,” says Phil Molé, a Chicago-based freelance writer and veteran debunker who investigated the 9/11 Truth movement for a 2006 article in
Skeptic
magazine. “And often they
are
smarter than the average person. They usually have some professional success under their belt. They've earned a degree. They think they're entitled to interpret things the way they see it—that they can declare everyone else to be wrong. The fact they happen to be smart doesn't deter them from conspiracy theories. Just the opposite: It
enables
them. It shields them in their own mind from criticism. They think that the reason these other people are criticizing them is, ‘They just don't get it. They're not as smart as I am. They don't know the things I know.'

“In the 9/11 Truth movement, you see a lot of that. These are people who pride themselves on being well informed. They read lots of stuff—a lot of it is just regurgitated from other 9/11 Truth sites, but they do read
something
. They can tell you exactly where such and such a plane was on such and such a day, or what was going on in Afghanistan at such and such a time. It's all isolated scraps of information, of course. But they pride themselves on having all these scattered facts in their brains. So they tell themselves, ‘Where do other people get off telling me that I'm wrong?' ”

Truther-wise, the leading crank is the dean of 9/11 Truth authors, David Ray Griffin. To this day, Griffin is known as one of the world's foremost experts in the field of Process Theology, a complex metaphysical discipline that defines God in relation to the exercise of free will. After retiring from the Claremont School of Theology in California, he filled his days by taking up conspiracism full time. His work ethic is legendary: When I visited him at his seaside California home in 2009, he told me that he sometimes spends fourteen-hour days on his research. (During our interview, he spoke to me for three hours straight—and seemed prepared to speak for hours more had I not gotten up to leave.) Since 2004, he has written no fewer than eleven books, in which he methodically examines virtually every minute of the 9/11 timeline—much as Donnelly examined every word of
King Lear
and
Othello
. The table of contents for his 2008 book
9/11 Contradictions
:
An Open Letter to Congress and the Press
, for instance, includes these chapters:

  1. How long did George Bush remain in the classroom?

  2. When did Dick Cheney enter the underground bunker?

  3. Was Cheney observed confirming a stand-down order?

  4. Did Cheney observe the land-all-planes order?

  5. When did Cheney issue shoot down authorization?

  6. Where was General Richard Myers?

  7. Where was Donald Rumsfeld?

  8. Did Ted Olson receive calls from Barbara Olson?

  9. When was the military alerted about Flight 11?

10. When was the military alerted about Flight 175?

11. When was the military alerted about Flight 77?

12. When was the military alerted about Flight 93?

13. Could the military have shot down Flight 93?

SUNY Buffalo economics professor Paul Zarembka takes an even more granular approach to his Truther research, dwelling at length on such arcane subjects as the price of individual airline stocks in the run-up to 9/11, and the tail numbers of the hijacked 9/11 aircraft, both of which he discusses at numbing length in his 2008 book
The Hidden History of 9/11
. To quote at random: “AA 11 is listed with tail number N334AA. Returning to BTS data, it had arrived into Boston from S.F. at 5:52 a.m. on 9–10 (as AA 198), judging from airborne time. While BTS data do not report arrival into Dulles (any time in September 2001) of an aircraft with tail number N644AA, airgames.bravehost.com ascertained that the FAA tail number N644AA is replaced in American Airlines reporting procedures by N5BPAA . . .”

Another (unusually young) 9/11 crank is Craig Ranke—a manic, elfin, endearingly odd thirtysomething software salesman who proudly introduced himself to me at a New York City Truth forum as the founder of an outfit called the 9/11 “Citizen Investigation Team.” At the time we met, he'd spent the last three years of his life investigating little else besides the flight path of American Airlines Flight 77, in hopes of proving that no plane ever hit the Pentagon. As with other cranks I've met, Ranke is certain that his narrow area of interest is the sardine-can key that will roll up the whole of the conspiracy.

It is an impulse that Donnelly and his fellow anti-Stratfordian cranks would have understood well. As I listened to Ranke recite his elaborate adventures crisscrossing the flight corridors of northern Virginia, it was difficult not to be reminded of Orville Ward Owen, a successful Detroit doctor who became so obsessed with Shakespearean conspiracism in the 1890s that he built a machine to “decode” Bacon's secret messages—a device consisting of two garbage-can sized spools, onto which was mounted a thousand-foot-long canvas sheet containing all Bacon's known works (including, of course, those attributed to William Shakespeare). Owen and his assistants would take a seat directly in front of the tautly mounted catalog of Bacon's mind, and then spin the spools rapidly, making the canvas sheet whip around like the magnetic ribbon in an audio cassette. While staring intently at the sheet, they captured and recorded the various repeating words and phrases that jumped out of Bacon's life work—and from this, cobbled together a six-volume opus called
Sir Francis Bacon's Cipher Story
, which not only confirmed Owen's theory that Bacon had written Shakespeare's works—as well as those of Christopher Marlowe and a half-dozen other famous writers—but that Bacon was Queen Elizabeth's son.

Sadly for Owen, the theory didn't fly. Even in this, the late golden age of Baconian conspiracism, Owen's “Cipher Wheel” was widely mocked. On his deathbed, in 1924, he warned a confidante to steer clear of Baconianism, “for you will only reap disappointment. When I discovered the Word Cipher, I had the largest practice of any physician in Detroit . . . Instead, [I] lost my fortune, ruined my health, and today am a bedridden almost penniless invalid.”

The Evangelical Doomsayer

In 2002,
Megadeth
founder and front man Dave Mustaine—regarded by many aficionados as the greatest heavy metal guitarist of all time—thought his music career was over. “I had fallen asleep on my [left] arm,” he later told an interviewer. “The circulation was cut off to the nerve on the inside of my left bicep. When the nerve lost circulation, it shrunk like a crunched up straw . . . The doctors said that I wasn't going to play again. They said I would get 80 percent use of my arm back, but not 100 percent, and I was told that I was certainly never going to play the way I played before again.”

But the doctors were wrong. After months of physical therapy, Mustaine taught himself to play the guitar again. In 2004, he reformed
Megadeth
, and the band has been a going concern ever since.

Mustaine returned to music a new man. At one point during his recovery, he climbed a hill and beheld a faraway cross. “Looking up at [it], I said six simple words: ‘What have I got to lose?' ” he later recalled. “Afterwards, my whole life has changed. It's been hard, but I wouldn't change it for anything. [I'd] rather go my whole life believing that there is a God and find out there isn't than live my whole life thinking there isn't a God and then find out, when I die, that there is.”

Some rockers who find Jesus migrate to the Christian-rock genre—which combines a conventional guitar-driven music style with pious lyrics that offer praise to God. Mustaine didn't go down that path. But he did begin to infuse his
Megadeth
compositions with apocalyptic imagery drawn from the modern American Evangelical tradition. The result was the 2009 album
Endgame
, whose title he described this way: “As a Christian, I believe [the elites' ‘end game'] is one-world government, one world currency . . . It's part of the master plan. It's what I believe. I [signed on] to that when I became Christian. I know that there's going to be a cataclysmic ramping up of all of these things that we're seeing right now. And it gets worse and it gets worse and we're watching our country disintegrate right now . . . That's what
Endgame
is all about. It's about educating our fans.”

The album cover of
Endgame
(which is also the name of a 2007 film written by Mustaine's friend, radio host Alex Jones) is a conspiracist masterpiece, combining an assortment of New World Order motifs in a single, vivid scene. Dominating the image is a legion of bald prisoners, their heads branded with government markings, marching to their doom down a narrow metal chute, which is formed by walls made up of FEMA coffins. “[We wanted it to be] like these Hebrews being marched through the Red Sea,” Mustaine explained. “And all the people that are in the Homeland Security jumpsuits with the bar code on their head—you know it doesn't say in the Bible if the bar code is going to be going this way or if it's going to be going that way, so we did some cool imagery . . . We made it look like a mohawk, but then when you zoom in on it, it's actually their bar code.”

The album's title track begins with a mock public-address announcement, declaring, “Attention! Attention! All citizens are ordered to report to their District detention centers! Do not return to your homes; do not contact anyone! Do not use any cellular or GPS devices! Surrender all weapons at once! Attention! This way to the camps!” And then come these lyrics:

I woke up in a black FEMA box

Darkness was all around me
,
in my coffin

My dreams are all nightmares anymore

And this is what I dream every night

The Leader of the New World Order
,
the President of the United States

Has declared anyone now residing inside the US of A

Without the [radio-frequency identification] chip
,
you're just an illegal alien

An enemy combatant of America
,
welcome to the New World Order

This is the end of the road
;
this is the end of the line

This is the end of your life
;
this is the . .
.

 

A society in a society
,
inside the fence life as you know it stops

They got their rules of conduct and we got ours

Be quick or be dead
,
you crumble up and die
,
the clock is

Ticking so slowly and so much can happen in an hour

 

I learned my lessons the hard way
,
every scar I earned

I had to bleed
,
inside the day yard

A system of controlled movement
,
like a giant ant farm

Any time is long time
,
now you're not in charge of your time anymore

 

The Ex-President signed a secret bill that can

Land a legal US Citizen in jail and the

Patriot act stripped away our constitutional rights

They say a concentration camp just popped up
,
yeah
,
right!

 

Refuse the chip? Ha! Get persecuted and beat by the

Tyranny of mind control
,
for the mark of the beast

All rights removed
,
you're punished
,
captured
,
and enslaved

Believe me when I say
,
“This is the Endgame!”

Like Joseph Farah, the Birther and WorldNetDaily editor profiled in the previous chapter, Mustaine epitomizes the conspiracist type I call the Evangelical Doomsayer. Conspiracism is attractive to the Doomsayer because it organizes all of the world's menacing threats into one monolithic force—allowing him to reconcile the bewildering complexities of our secular world with the good-versus-evil narrative contained in the book of Revelation and other religious texts.