Among the Truthers (28 page)

Then there was the king of the dial, Rush Limbaugh, a former disc jockey from Sacramento who'd become a force of radio nature in the late 1980s. Like the preachers, his tone was superficially chipper—but his message was serious. “Liberalism is a scourge,” he declared to an interviewer in 1993, summarizing his worldview. “It destroys the human spirit. It destroys prosperity. It assigns sameness to everybody.” I found myself hypnotized by his style—which channeled all of the populist rage I'd heard on WFAN into the equally tribalized world of American politics.

As Brian Anderson argued in his 2005 book,
South Park Conservatives
:
The Revolt Against Liberal Media Bias
, the populist AM talk-radio movement that Limbaugh godfathered changed the face of American politics. Among other accomplishments, it sank Hillarycare, propelled the Republicans to domination of both houses of Congress in 1994, and (most significantly) convinced tens of millions of Americans that the news they read and saw in the mainstream media was tainted by liberal bias. Better yet, Limbaugh spread his message with a confident, entertaining, self-satirizing brio that differed sharply from conventional network news broadcasts. The fact that it was a mass phenomenon—a world away from the somewhat haughty, rarified world of NPR—was itself a selling point for the Limbaugh brand: Many of his listeners felt they were enlisting in a newly formed ideological legion, not unlike the modern Tea Party, that would make its collective voice heard in Washington. In 1996, that legion would go on to become the core audience of a brand new, unapologetically opinionated television network called FOX News.

What launched Limbaugh's career wasn't a backlash against any particular development in American politics or culture. (He started his nationally broadcast show in 1988, at a time when the Republicans still controlled the White House, and Bill Clinton was still the governor of Arkansas.) It was something more mundane: the reform of broadcast regulations that had been muzzling American radio hosts since 1949.

The old policy was the Federal Communications Commission's Fairness Doctrine, a rule that required broadcasters to give equal time to both sides of an issue. In theory, the rule meant that if a radio host promoted, say, gun control, his station was required to provide time for the NRA to deliver a rebuttal. In practice, most station owners simply avoided political talk entirely. But in 1987, Dennis Patrick, named as FCC chairman by Ronald Reagan, repealed the doctrine, setting off an immediate boom in political programming.

When Limbaugh began broadcasting nationally in 1988, Americans still thought of political talk as a stuffy business conducted by Beltway insiders and bow-tied pundits, the sort of thing one endured before football on Sundays. But Limbaugh was an entertainer who salted his rhetoric with satire. “Greetings, conservatives across the fruited plain,” went an introductory riff. “This is Rush Limbaugh, the most dangerous man in America, with the largest hypothalamus in North America, serving humanity simply by opening my mouth, destined for my own wing in the Museum of Broadcasting, executing everything I do flawlessly with zero mistakes, doing this show with half my brain tied behind my back just to make it fair because I have a talent on loan from . . . God. Rush Limbaugh. A man. A legend. A way of life.”

Prior to the 1980s, the primary forum for movement conservatism had been think-tank newsletters and wonky magazines like
National Review
. But these weren't outlets for the common man:
National Review
's circulation peaked in 1994 at 270,000, about one-fiftieth the number of listeners that Limbaugh attracts every week. With the rise of conservative talk radio and then FOX, William Buckley, George Will, and other members of conservative's old, patrician guard suddenly found themselves on the sidelines.

But even after deregulation, the basic structure of the mass media still presented a problem for true conspiracy theorists: Radio stations and cable channels, no less than newspapers and magazines, generally remained in the control of large, profit-seeking, risk-averse corporations. And all of them—including Limbaugh's show—remained staffed by a hierarchy of gatekeeping producers and editors.

Historically, these factors never have served to exclude conspiracism from the mass media entirely (as a late-night trip through the AM radio dial will attest). But they generally have restricted it to themes that were politically popular, or at least tolerated, by society at large—such as anti-Masonry in the nineteenth century, racism and anti-Semitism in the decades before WWII, and anticommunism in the 1950s. In all other contexts, conspiracists were forced to the disreputable margins of the media marketplace: pornographic magazines, leaflet handouts, church-basement lectures, late-night radio, and community-access television.

The Internet destroyed all of these communications barriers overnight, which is why it immediately became the dominant hub for virtually every conspiracist subculture in existence—including jihadism. (The only exception is Scientology, which continues to be promoted primarily through the movement's well-funded bricks-and-mortar urban drop-in centers—and this only because its controlling body operates as a moneymaking business, and therefore aggressively enforces copyright on the movement's texts.) Communication on the web is cheap, global, immediate, and uncensored. And so it is perfectly suited for unfunded, geographically disparate activists seeking to promote a dissident message.

Just as importantly, the Internet fuels the conspiracist's fervor by providing him with a sense of community. In the modern age, conspiracism has blurred into social networking in many contexts: Activists are constantly leaving comments on one another's blogs and Facebook pages, emailing tips and links back and forth, and even interviewing one another on Internet radio shows. While some of this networking consists of the exchange of substantive information, it also represents an exercise in mutual self-congratulation and emotional support.

As this positive social feedback becomes addictive, the conspiracist's network of enablers grows—often to such a point that it crowds out the conspiracy theorist's nonbelieving friends. The process resembles the formation of an electronic cocoon that envelops a conspiracist with codependents. Surrounded by an enabling group of the like-minded, he gradually embraces the delusion that his movement has gained critical mass, and that his blog postings and email petitions are being read in the corridors of power.

The modern web-based conspiracist has a conflicted attitude toward the mainstream media. On the one hand, he is a futurist who triumphantly dismisses the printing press and the evening news as a relic of a bygone pre-Internet age. And so he takes a reflexive, shoot-the-messenger approach to any mainstream criticism of his movement. Whenever a mainstream newspaper or magazine cuts jobs or goes bankrupt, conspiracist websites inevitably erupt in spasms of
schadenfreude
—citing the news as proof that the old top-down, elitist model of journalism is giving way to an epic communications revolution that they themselves claim to be leading. To quote Truther Kevin Barrett: “It is necessary that folklorists and others in the human sciences think about the way the many-to-many medium of digitally-enhanced folk communication is overthrowing the old one-to-many media of elite-generated social control that have dominated more and more of this planet over the past 5,000 years. To study the 9/11 truth movement is to study what may turn out to be the cutting edge of the most significant social-structural change in the history of humanity.”

Yet notwithstanding such utopian notions, most conspiracists understand that the hated “MSM” is still an influential player in the marketplace of ideas. And so it is maddening that CNN and the
New York Times
persist in ignoring their “discoveries” about 9/11 and other false-flag plots. At Truther events where I was publicly outed as a journalistic observer by someone at the microphone (a common occurrence after I'd published a few
National Post
columns about my interest in conspiracy theories), I noticed a mix of contradictory reactions. On one hand, I was applauded for my “courage” in breaking an MSM taboo, and exposing myself to the Truth firsthand. On the other hand, I also was treated as a flesh-and-blood target on which Truthers could unleash cultish, pent-up hostility against my industry. Often, angry activists would lecture me about what other journalists had written about their profession—as if I bore some fraternal responsibility for the crimes of my MSM colleagues.

Through the Internet's Looking Glass

In 2005, Harvard Law School professor Cass Sunstein and two other researchers performed an experiment involving sixty Colorado adults. Sunstein divided the participants into two sets of small groups—one conservative, one liberal—based on their responses to a screening questionnaire, and then asked them to discuss three contentious questions: (1) “Should states allow same-sex couples to enter into civil unions?” (2) “Should employers engage in ‘affirmative action' by giving a preference to members of traditionally disadvantaged groups?” (3) “Should the United States sign an international treaty to combat global warming?”

Not surprisingly, the self-identified conservatives were more likely than self-identified liberals to answer no to all of these questions, both before and after their discussions. But Sunstein noted another interesting pattern: In virtually all of the groups, members ended up embracing more polarized positions following fifteen minutes of conversation with their ideological bedfellows—a phenomenon he describes in his research as “group polarization.”

These results help demonstrate why modern electronic communication tools have done little to break down ideological divides—and, in many cases, have helped exacerbate them.

When the Internet became a truly mass medium in the late 1990s, there was a widespread belief that it heralded a golden age not only in communication, but in human relations: With so much information available for free from all around the world, futurists gushed, human beings would come to understand one another as never before. Like the ham-radio enthusiasts of yesteryear, we would spend our days conversing with people from other continents and opposite points on the ideological spectrum, building bridges of knowledge and understanding.

The result has been just the opposite: The Internet actually has exacerbated the human instinct toward parochialism, tribalism, and conspiracism.

Most web surfers, it turns out, have little interest in meeting pen pals in faraway places. Instead, people tend to use the web for work, school, shopping, entertainment, celebrity gossip, cute videos, photo-sharing, and chatting with people they already know. (It's notable, for instance, that MySpace, which facilitates social networking between strangers, has for years been losing market share to Facebook, which is designed to create virtual networks out of real-life flesh-and-blood friendships.) When using the Internet to access news, most of us tend to consult a small set of sites that cater to our preexisting ideological niche. Politically active leftists, for instance, tend to get their news from sites such as Huffington Post, Daily Kos, Democratic Underground,
The Guardian
, and CounterPunch; while those on the Right go to Instapundit, National Review Online, Free Republic, and FOX News. Among bloggers and cable TV talking heads, the need to get noticed amid the din of competing voices has had a centrifugal effect, pushing commentary to the outer fringes on both sides of the Left-Right spectrum. According to a principle known as Godwin's Law, attributed to famed Internet lawyer Mike Godwin, every argument on the Internet always ends up with one side being compared to Adolf Hitler. Thanks to Glenn Beck, Godwin's Law may be observed on your TV screen as well.

Many true conspiracy theorists I've met don't even bother with web surfing anymore—they rely for their news on the menu of stories that are delivered automatically to their email accounts through RSS feeds, daily email newsletters, and Facebook groups. From the very instant they first boot up their computer in the morning, their inboxes comprise an unbroken catalog of outrage stories ideologically tailored to their preexisting obsessions.

The image of the world that emerges from this catalog bears little resemblance to the world most of us know. It is a dark, conspiratorial place where (to take the right-wing sites as an example) Christianity is under siege, political correctness has gone amok, militant gay activists have taken over every school board, and the White House flies the green flag of Islam. A sampling of WorldNetDaily news alerts from late 2009 and early 2010, for instance, presented readers with this itemized description of the state of America: “Lesbian awarded custody of Christian's only child,” “Fistgate: Obama chief ‘knew' of ‘disgusting' sex subjects,” “Christian fathers put in jail for shunning explicit sex ed,” “Obama's Christmas tree has Chairman Mao, transvestite,” “Girl Scouts hiding secret sex agenda?” and “Banished! City forbids Bible studies in homes.”

Overtorqued as WorldNetDaily's stories may be, they qualify as blue-chip journalism compared to much of what gets passed around on peer-to-peer email networks. In late 2008, for instance, a message declaring that Barack Obama was a secret Muslim made its way into millions of inboxes. Another popular claim was that the U.S. government was going to create a 9/11 memorial that was crescent-shaped, in tribute to the Islamic faith of the terrorists—a myth that effectively tapped into conservatives' (not entirely baseless) belief that the nation's media and government were bending over backwards to avoid offending Muslims. Such tall tales typically remain popular on the Internet for months or even years at a stretch—the Internet-era equivalent of medieval folk legends. In all cases, it would take the credulous recipient just a few seconds to check these rumors against a reputable website such as Snopes or Wikipedia. But if the rumor accords with his or her preexisting conspiracist fears, he often will simply assume it is true and forward it to his friends.