Among the Truthers (29 page)

In some cases, Internet rumor-mongering—or even just the fear thereof—has served to reverse government decisions and policies. In October 2010, for instance, Barack Obama canceled a scheduled trip to the Sikh Golden Temple in Amritsar, India, because Sikh tradition would have required the president to wear a head covering before entering the temple; and the resulting photo-op would have encouraged rumors that Obama is Muslim. (Americans often confuse the Islamic and Sikh faiths. Four days after 9/11, in fact, a murderer gunned down a Sikh gas station attendant in Mesa, Arizona, believing him to be Muslim.)

In Texas, an Internet-based conspiracist campaign helped preempt one of the largest infrastructure projects in U.S. history—the Trans-Texas Corridor (TTC), a four-thousand-mile road-and-rail transportation network that would parallel Interstate 35 and US 59, both of which have become congested in recent years thanks to the increased flow of goods to and from Mexico. The tipping point came after a business coalition called North America's SuperCorridor Coalition (NASCO) put out a stylized map showing how the TTC would anchor a spine of road-and-rail arteries extending from southern Mexico to Montreal, Winnipeg, Edmonton, and Vancouver. The most strident critics of the TTC—including WorldNetDaily writer Jerome Corsi, who included a chapter on the subject in his 2007 conspiracist book
The Late Great USA
:
The Coming Merger With Mexico and Canada—
seized on the image as proof that the plan actually was part of a larger plot (hatched by the Council on Foreign Relations) to destroy America's national sovereignty by creating an EU-style “North American Union”—complete with a new currency (the “Amero”) and a secret “shadow government” created under the auspices of the American-Canadian-Mexican Security and Prosperity Partnership. These conspiracy theories became so popular in the latter years of the Bush presidency—almost entirely on the strength of web-circulated propaganda—that legislatures in eighteen states actually introduced resolutions condemning the mythical “NAFTA Superhighway” of which the TTC supposedly was a part; and Lou Dobbs denounced it on CNN. In the end, the TTC plan became so politically toxic that it fizzled.

M
ainstream journalists have been known to turn their noses up at the Internet's rumor mill. But the paranoid character of the blogosphere has, without a doubt, rubbed off on them. During the Bush administration,
New York Times
op-ed columnists Frank Rich and Paul Krugman became celebrities by portraying George W. Bush and Dick Cheney as outright liars seeking to turn the United States into a warmongering theocracy. On the Right, FOX News host Glenn Beck—whom a Gallup poll identified in December 2009 as the fourth-most-admired man in America (between Nelson Mandela and Pope Benedict XVI)—has described President Barack Obama as “a guy who has a deep-seated hatred for white people or the white culture,” likened Democratic health care plans to the content of
Mein Kampf
, and warned that the United States is headed toward “totalitarianism beyond your wildest imagination.” (For a time, Beck even spread the notion that FEMA is building concentration camps in the United States to jail “dissidents.”) Seized by the same spirit, Rush Limbaugh has suggested to his listeners that Barack Obama might cancel the 2012 elections, and that environmentalists might have blown up BP's Deepwater Horizon offshore drilling rig in the Gulf of Mexico as a plot to derail offshore oil exploration. (“The Constitution has just been ripped to shreds, so why is anything safe?” he asked listeners.) In this overheated media environment, with extremists from both sides cheering one another on in their self-selected echo chambers, the stigma against conspiracism enforced by the professional journalist guild of the postwar era is eroding.

Thanks to the way information is accessed on the Internet, even the most prosaic inquiries can lead users down the path of conspiracism. Columbia University Shakespeare expert James Shapiro was appalled to learn, in 2009, that “Nine of the top 10 hits in a recent Google search for ‘Shakespeare' and ‘authorship' directed the curious to sites that called into question Shakespeare's authorship.” Anxious parents who enter “vaccines” and “autism” into Google's search engine will find prominent links to sites that promote the debunked link between vaccine “neurotoxins” and autism. Enter “9/11” into Google, and you will find links to Truther conspiracy sites. Google “WTC 7,” and the very first site is a Truth site—which means it will pop up automatically using Google's “I'm feeling lucky” option.

The problem is that Google, the most popular search engine, generally ranks sites according to their popularity—not their reliability. So a flashy, well-traveled site peddling discredited conspiracies will be featured more prominently in Google's search results than, say, a government website full of accurate information about the same subject. In many cases, the most authoritative information doesn't turn up in a Google search at all—because it is buried in “deep web” repositories such as subscription-only scientific journals, journalistic archives, court records, and government databases.

Once ensnared, Internet conspiracists often exhibit the same obsessive behavior patterns as people addicted to Internet gambling services, pornography, and video games: The material they crave is cheap (or free), unlimited, and accessible within the privacy of their own home. Like other kinds of addicts, they describe an initial period of addiction in which they remained glued to their computer screens for weeks on end. One former Truther, for instance, described this descent into addiction following a tip from a Rastafarian Truther who worked at his local “head shop”: “Feeling very Matrix-ish, I watched
Zeitgeist
[a 2007 Truther film] and thought it made sense. I was poor and unsuccessful and here was why. The Federal Reserve, Bilderbergers, NWO, CENTCOM, Henry Kissinger, and Karl Rove were all keeping me down. Now that I was on Google Video, I had a whole library of CT movies to watch for free . . . I literally spent two weeks watching what I thought was a worldwide conspiracy being unveiled before my very eyes.”

Internet conspiracism propagates itself using a cross-fertilization model: Facebook pages, email lists and blogs associated with a given conspiracist camp invariably become sympathetic sounding boards for related conspiracy theories. In the Summer of 2005, for instance, 9/11 Truth sites became inundated with theorists claiming that the London transit bombings were an inside job. And when the H1N1 virus hit in the fall of 2009, the established network of autism/antivaccine conspiracy theorists immediately incorporated the new vaccine drive into their propaganda.

Often, conspiracist propaganda appears just days, or even hours, after the underlying event—even before the “official” narrative has been fully developed in the mainstream media. On the afternoon of November 5, 2009, as I was writing this chapter, Nidal Malik Hasan walked into the Soldier Readiness Center at Ford Hood military base outside Killeen, Texas, jumped onto a desk, and began firing shots from a semiautomatic pistol. By the time his rampage was over, thirteen people were dead, and thirty others were wounded. The circumstances of the killings—perpetrated by a military psychiatrist with a documented record of erratic behaviour and religious radicalism, and observed directly by dozens of surviving witnesses—hardly lent themselves to conspiracy theories. Yet shortly thereafter, a conspiracist narrative began taking shape on FederalJack.com, a self-described “user driven news source dedicated to exposing information and multimedia relating to the New World Order takeover of the United States and the rest of the free world”:

Ok, let's get this out of the way. Fort Hood—tragic. Now let's look at some reality.
One
guy shooting a hand gun killed
how
many people—and on a military base? Are you serious? And the one shooter is now in a coma? And, as of now at least, there's no surveillance camera footage? And he's a Muslim who also happens to be a serviceman with a mental disorder involving gunplay who did it with privately owned weapons? This thing could not have been scripted or casted better if Hollywood had produced it. Let's see: Private gun ownership demonized—check. Muslims demonized—check. Military personnel demonized—check. Base-dwelling troops at home terrorized by a fellow American—check. Yet another chance to distract the public—check . . . Thirteen killed and 30 wounded by one man with two pistols. Nearly a 50% kill rate. Ever fired a handgun? Ever tried aiming and firing two at a time? Under pressure? Ever reload a handgun under pressure? There were people shooting at him. That's a little pressure. We're talking about yet
another
superhuman performance by a ‘lone gunman' who is conveniently not conscious to tell the tale . . . ‘But the government would never do such a thing to its own troops!' Uh, excuse me. It's putting thousands of them through a meat grinder in a pointless, unwinnable charade of a war as we speak—in two countries, while gearing up for two more (Iran and Pakistan). Do you think the dead and wounded from overseas are any less dead and wounded [than the] victims from Fort Hood?

Links to the FederalJack site began popping up all over the established Truther groups I was monitoring, and the narrative was quickly assimilated into their mythology. For the web addicts who get their news from such sites, the official theory never had a chance.

I
n the real world, all of us learn—usually quite early in life—that some sources of information are more trustworthy than others; that some people are experts, and others are not, that some people lie, and other people tell the truth. When people try to convince us to buy something from them, or sleep with them, or take their advice, we scrutinize their faces, their clothes, their mannerisms, their backgrounds, for indicators of expertise and sincerity. But on the Internet, where disreputable sources can hide behind the anonymizing silkscreen of a professional-seeming website, all these age-old human safeguards are short-circuited—making it an ideal medium for conspiracists who, in person, often seem eccentric. In many cases, fringe conspiracy theorists even have managed to create professional-seeming “journals” that lend scholarly prestige to their fantasies, such as the “peer-reviewed”
Journal of 9/11 Studies
. Many of the Truthers I correspond with now back up their theories with citations from such publications, expecting that they be treated with the same seriousness as
Nature
or
Proceedings of the National Academy of Science
.

Like everything else discussed in this chapter, this toxic distortion of the marketplace of ideas has arisen from a supposed
virtue
of the Internet: its utility as a medium for “crowdsourcing”—defined by (what else?) Wikipedia as “the act of taking tasks traditionally performed by an employee or contractor, and outsourcing them to a group of people or community, through an ‘open call' to a large group of people (a crowd) asking for contributions.”

In many contexts, crowdsourcing can be an accurate and highly cost-effective means of collecting information. In James Surowiecki's influential 2004 book
The Wisdom of Crowds
:
Why the Many Are Smarter Than The Few
, he tells the story, borrowed from Francis Galton, about how the averaged estimates of random English fairgoers more accurately assessed the weight of a particular ox than estimates provided by individual cattle experts. Facebook members use the crowdsourcing principle when they put out a status-update inviting friends to suggest a good restaurant in a particular city, or a good doctor for their family. And then there's Wikipedia, a crowdsourced encyclopedia that in the space of just a few years has become perhaps the single most influential information resource on the entire planet.

But the only reason Wikipedia works is that its entries—particularly those relating to controversial subjects—ultimately are controlled by a corps of dedicated editors working in a traditional top-down hierarchy. When those editors step into the background, the site becomes just another free-for-all dominated by spammers and propagandists.

In the context of conspiracy theorists, the problem arises from the fact that the people with the most bizarre and extreme views tend also to be the most enthusiastic and prolific contributors to crowdsourced media—since those who hold conventional attitudes usually see little point in expressing the obvious.

This becomes clear if you peruse the “customer reviews” that pop up on the product-information screen for books sold on Amazon and other electronic bookstores. Here, a naïve reader seeking to gauge the veracity of a conspiracist tract usually will find an almost unbroken string of rave reviews—not a surprise, since the only people willing to plow through such books, let alone bother to post online about them, tend to be conspiracy theorists to begin with. In the spring of 2010, for instance, WorldNetDaily reporters Aaron Klein and Brenda Elliott published
The Manchurian President
:
Barack Obama's Ties to Communists
,
Socialists and Other Anti-American Extremists
, a standard-issue catalog of Birtheresque guilt-by-association conspiracy theories panned by those few respectable media outlets that deigned to acknowledge the book's existence. Yet in the review section of Amazon, the authors are portrayed as nothing short of Woodward and Bernstein. As of mid-May 2010, more than half of reviewers gave the book a perfect five-star rating. Similarly, when I looked up Daniel Estulin's
The True Story of the Bilderberg Group
, on Amazon, the main page featured just a single negative review among the dozen or so on offer—and even that lone naysayer was upset principally by the fact that Estulin hadn't probed deeply enough into the Rothschild family and their “hidden agenda of the New World Order.”