Among the Truthers (34 page)

What helped me understand the benign origins of this surreal, emperor-has-no-clothes hunt for racist phantasms was the actual substance of my coursework—and, in particular, my classes on constitutional law—in which much of the material focused on the great victories against the very real racism embedded in America's legal framework until well into the 1960s, and arguably beyond that. (For instance,
Loving v. Virginia
, the U.S. Supreme Court case striking down Virginia's antimiscegenation statute, was not decided until 1967.) The 1954 case of
Brown v. Board of Education
in particular, was taken as the ultimate touchstone of America's moral redemption; just as its racist 1896 precedent,
Plessy v. Ferguson
—upholding the doctrine of “separate but equal”—was taken as a byword for racist hypocrisy. Like everyone else in my class, I remember being genuinely moved by
Brown
and similar cases, and by the back-stories of the litigants who'd fought them. While most of us knew we were destined to become anonymous corporate lawyers and litigators in large law firms, the civil rights crusade launched by our professional forebears filled us with lawyerly pride. Thanks to them, blacks were living Martin Luther King's dream of full racial equality, and overt racism had been pushed to the margins of American society. Armed with the same individual rights as the rest of us, we hoped and expected, blacks would quickly rise to the same level as their white neighbors.

Except, three decades after King's death, they hadn't—not where it counted, anyway: in jobs, education, housing, earning power, crime, or any other index of socioeconomic success. The complex reasons for this lie beyond the scope of this book (and, in any case, are so commonly catalogued by America's race-obsessed talking heads that I doubt anyone needs to hear them repeated, even in capsule form). But for the young and the idealistic, the fine points of gang culture, welfare-trap economics, and single parenthood were beside the point: Racism, we'd all learned in school, was America's congenital disease. And the fact that blacks had not yet achieved full, practical equality meant it hadn't yet been fully treated. It was not a question of
whether
America was racist—that fact was answered by the data. It was a question of
how
. And if the answer couldn't be found in the plain language of laws and policy statements, it must somehow be lodged in hidden, even invisible, places, such as our own minds and words.

It was this benign but misguided instinct, not any inherently totalitarian urge to control others, that gave birth to political correctness and the associated, increasingly conspiratorial witch hunt for racist phantasms within our souls. As illiberal as it seems, this conspiracist spirit is precious to those infused by it: Once one surrenders to it, all of the inequities in our society—between men and women, blacks and whites—can be chalked up to the familiar, reassuringly simplistic bogeyman of bigotry.

Political correctness and radical identity politics have subsided slightly since their high-water mark in the early 1990s, in large part thanks to a backlash by right-wing culture warriors allied with principled leftist free-speechers. But like Marxism, it has left behind a toxic ideological residue on our intellectual coastline: a vague but powerful baseline belief among educated liberals that mainstream society is divided into victims and oppressors—and that the latter are largely white, male, straight middle-aged men who look a lot like George W. Bush and Donald Rumsfeld. After a few years spent wandering this coastline, the belief that these people might fly planes into the World Trade Center doesn't follow automatically, but it certainly becomes a lot easier to assimilate.

Showdown in the Bowery

There's an old joke about a lone Jewish sailor marooned on a tiny desert island in the middle of the South Pacific. After years of solitude, the castaway's signal fire is spotted by the captain of a passing freighter, who wades ashore to rescue the man. Thereupon, the captain is astonished to find that the Jew has built himself not one, but two small mud-and-straw synagogues side by side.

“Why
two
?” asks the captain.

“That one is where I pray,” replies the Jew, gesturing solemnly to the synagogue on the left.

“ . . . But as for
that
one,” he adds, raising a rueful finger at the other building, “I wouldn't set foot in the place if you
paid
me.”

That punch line neatly sums up the schismatic conspiracism on display over the weekend of September 11–13, 2009—the eighth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks—when lower Manhattan played host to not one, but two rival Truther conferences, just a few blocks from one another. Both events attracted hundreds of attendees, all convinced that the 9/11 attacks had been an inside job. Aside from that, the two groups had little in common.

The first group—call them the right-wing New World Order faction—was young, loud, and libertarian. Under the banner of “We Are Change,” they staged “street actions” outside Madison Square Garden, the Council on Foreign Relations (where they screamed “We won't be your New World Order slave puppets” to CFR president Richard Haass) and at Ground Zero itself. Their leader was Luke Rudkowski, a brooding twenty-three-year-old bullhorn activist (profiled in Chapter 5) who specializes in ambushing public figures on video with questions about 9/11. The most revered name on their lips was radio host Alex Jones; the most despised, the Bilderbergers (“scumbags trying to destroy humanity” was how one activist described them in a speech at Cooper Union). Everyone, it seemed, was carrying some form of digital camera, endlessly filming everyone else filming everyone else. Populism and patriotism were the binding ideological agents. Some of the speakers, in fact, were actual 9/11 first responders, former soldiers, and other uniformed types. Their speeches often were interrupted by chants of “U-S-A! U-S-A!”

Meanwhile, at St. Mark's Church in-the-Bowery, an entirely different conference was unfolding, this one under the banner of “We Demand Transparency: The Conference for Peace, Truth, and a New Economics.” Here, the attendees were older, grayer, quieter—tweedy academics and activists in sportjackets and tennis shoes, with one foot still planted in Cold War–era pacifism. There were few cameras. Unlike at We Are Change's all-electronic right-wing jamboree, the people here were actually holding, reading, selling, and discussing old-fashioned
books
. These fathers and grandfathers did not go in for “street actions” or other noisy events. Instead, they sat in their pews and listened to a succession of wonky middle-aged men (they were all men) give Amerikan-themed history lessons about false flags, Vietnam, and the Bay of Pigs. The room was hot, and many of the attendees were clustered around the fans arrayed along the side walls. At a few points, I felt myself nodding off.

Then, Kevin Barrett took the podium, and everyone woke up.

Barrett is a balding, bespectacled man in his early fifties—the sort of fellow whose thumbnail photo might appear alongside the Yiddish-dictionary entry for
nebbish
. But from his base in Madison, Wisconsin, he's made a name for himself in Truther circles as one of the movement's say-anything bad boys. Born into a conventional midwestern Lutheran family (his father was Olympic gold-medal sailor Peter Barrett), Barrett converted to Islam in 1992, after marrying a Moroccan-born Muslim woman. Five years later, he earned a PhD in African languages and literature at the University of Wisconsin, where he remained employed as a lecturer until he created an uproar by publicly insisting that Muslims weren't involved in the World Trade Center attacks. (“Every single Muslim I know in Madison knew it was an inside job.”) Since then, he's been arrested for alleged domestic abuse, run a fringe campaign for Congress, hosted conspiracist radio programs, launched a series of ugly feuds with competing conspiracists, and started up a creepy website that publishes the home addresses of police officers and other government officials “who are alleged to have seriously abused their power over others.”

Barrett began his presentation at St. Mark's by arguing that the involvement of Muslims in the 9/11 operation would be an impossibility, since the tenets of Islam are incompatible with any sort of unprovoked violence. Instead, he said, the obvious villain is Israel—or, as he called it, the “genocidal settler colonial state in Palestine.” But making this case to the American people is difficult, he said, because Jews are “wildly overrepresented in the American media,” and all the major media companies are led by “Zionist Jewish CEOs.” Nor can we trust the official 9/11 commission, Barrett says, since its executive director, Philip Zelikow, is an “ethnic Jew.”

None of these claims would have been particularly surprising for anyone who'd studied Barrett's comments about Jews and Israel, in which he often recycles traditional anti-Semitic propaganda themes, as in this mass emailing addressing the Lebanese government's discrimination against Palestinians: “The hundreds of thousands of [Palestinian] refugees living in poverty in Lebanon, among other places, should be treated as honored guests; while the economic losses that ordinary Lebanese will suffer when the Palestinians compete with them in the work force, and all other losses suffered by the victims of Zionism, should be compensated ASAP by the seizure of Zionist money, starting with the Rothschild fortune along with those of the other 50% of American billionaires who are Zionist war criminals.”

And it gets worse. Since leaving the University of Wisconsin, Barrett has become that rare breed: a
left-wing
Holocaust skeptic. Back in 2006, he described his views on the subject this way: “Whatever the facts about WWII, it seems tragic that systematic Zionist Big Lies [about the Middle East] have cast legitimate doubt upon ANYTHING Jews say about Jews and their recent history, including the Holocaust. As a rational person who is not a specialist in the subject of WWII, but who has studied the history of Zionist Big Lies vis-à-vis Palestine, I cannot possibly dismiss the arguments of people like [Mark] Green, [David] Irving, and even [Ernst] Zündel. And even if the 6-million-deliberately-murdered-for-purely-ethnic-reasons figure is correct—which it very well may be; I have grown agnostic on that after studying the Big Lies of Zionism—I would still have to characterize the Holocaust as it is taught in the U.S. as a hideously destructive myth.”

As Barrett spoke, there was an uncomfortable stir in the crowd. One particular fellow—a middle-aged Truther with a boyish face and a shaggy 1970s-style mop of brown hair, seated about twenty feet to my right—could barely contain his exasperation. Later on, he identified himself to me as Steve Alten, a science-fiction author best known for his
Meg
action novels about a family of giant prehistoric sharks (the megalodon) that eat boats, helicopters, whales, and (in historical flashback) a Tyrannosaurus Rex.

When the Q&A began, Alten rose from his seat. “I consider you a friend, and I've been on your [Internet radio] show many times,” he told Barrett. “But you start off with the idea that we shouldn't use racial profiling against Muslims, which I agree with, as a Jew. And then you completely become a hypocrite, and
blame
the Jews. You put up a list of Jewish people in the media, and immediately label them Zionist, and [suggest] that they have motivations for covering up 9/11, without any shred of evidence, without ever having met any of those people . . . You're actually hurting the 9/11 Truth movement by doing these things!” Then Alten sat down, to scattered applause.

A few minutes later, as the audience dispersed for lunch, Barrett came over to make peace with Alten. But their conversation degenerated into another argument. As I listened in, alongside a few others, I found myself in the odd position of cheering on one conspiracy theorist in what seemed to me a principled attack on a bigoted counterpart. (At one especially surreal point, Barrett—whom I'd interviewed previously—actually ushered me into the conversation to adjudicate some tangential point or other about Middle Eastern history.)

Later on, when I caught up with Alten, he told me that the whole episode symbolized what's wrong with the 9/11 Truth movement—an opinion shared by others I interviewed at St. Mark's. “I was shocked that they allowed Barrett to speak,” he told me. “He's become so radical . . . I've basically cornered him into admitting his desire to see Israel wiped off the face of the map. Who would ever want to be associated with someone like that? He used to speak out about the facts of 9/11. But he now uses the 9/11 Truth podium to tie everything into the Jews.”

Conspiracism's Hateful Sidekick

Not all conspiracy theorists are anti-Semitic. But all conspiracy movements—all of them—attract anti-Semites. Even UFO conspiracists manage, somehow, to project Jewish stereotypes on imagined visitors from other galaxies: A recurring theme in their literature is that outer-space visitors are divided into at least two categories—tall, virtuous, Aryan-seeming aliens (sometimes traced to the star Procyon, in the constellation Canis Minor); and malignant, gnomelike, big-nosed “Grays” (sometimes traced to the star Rigel, in the Orion constellation).

The roots of this ancient bigotry extend to the very moment when Jesus died on the Cross. “Most Christians did not want to be enemies of the Roman Empire and they soon sought to play down the role of the Romans in the [Biblical] story,” Diarmaid MacCulloch explains in
Christianity
:
The First Three Thousand Years
. “So the Passion narratives shifted the blame on to the Jewish authorities”—a propaganda effort epitomized in the Gospel of Matthew, wherein the Jewish crowds are made to roar out “His blood be on us, and on our children!” (As MacCulloch archly notes, “It would have been better for the moral health of Christianity if the blame had stayed with Pilate.”) In the superstitious medieval anti-Semitic tradition that eventually emerged—as described earlier in this book—the Jew was a sort of wandering demon, poisoning drinking water and murdering Christian babies to satisfy his inborn bloodlust.

Many centuries later—after the French Revolution and the wave of frenzied anti-Semitic conspiracism that accompanied it—the Jew became a symbol of the political, technological, and industrial forces threatening to overturn Europe's sleepy pastoral monarchies. Capitalism, in particular, along with the wrenching creative destruction that inevitably accompanied it, was imagined to be the creation of rootless Jewish financiers—
Luftmenschen
, or “people of the air,” as German anti-Semites called them—who leeched their income off society's farmers, laborers, and artisans. In French society, this attitude came into full bloom during the Dreyfus affair; and, before it, the 1890s-era scandal surrounding the collapse of the Panama Canal Company, which the
Libre Parole
newspaper described as “a flagrant instance of the Jewish peril,” and evidence that “all of Jewry, high and low” lay “congregated beneath the udder of this milch cow.”

As discussed in Chapter 2, anti-Semitic conspiracists of this period played to the nostalgic, reactionary, backward-looking attitude that inevitably takes hold of insecure people in tumultuous times. Poisonous anti-Semitism penetrated all strata of European society in the decades leading up to World War II. But it found its most enthusiastic audience among romantic nationalists who fetishized their country's fading pastoral identity and aristocratic traditions, which the “rootless” urban Jew was seen to be undermining. This made the doctrine useful to Russia's czars, and Europe's other besieged monarchs, who pushed the idea that political liberalism was a Jewish plot to destroy Europe's Christian character.

As the influence of the
Protocols
swept west, Germany, afflicted with a particularly feverish strain of nationalism, showed itself to be especially vulnerable. “When [German anti-Semites of the
völkisch
variety] looked to the past, to the ideal state which they supposed to have preceded the modern age, they looked far beyond throne and altar, back to an infinitely remote and almost entirely mythical world,” wrote Norman Cohn in
Warrant for Genocide
. “For them, ‘the Jew' was not only, or mainly, the destroyer of kings and the enemy of the Church—he was above all the age-old antagonist of the Germanic peasant, he was the force which for two thousand years had been undermining the true, original German way of life.”

Adolf Hitler put a pseudoscientific gloss on such dark superstitions by tethering them to the germ theory of medicine and associated notions of “racial hygiene.” As early as 1919, when Hitler was still employed as an education officer with the German Army in Munich, he described Jewry as “the racial tuberculosis of the peoples.” With the newly available tools of industrial slaughter, the Jew now could be scientifically eradicated in the same way that a hospital room could be sterilized. In pursuing this project, Hitler created a genocide so horribly systematic that it has become the standard of evil against which all other crimes against humanity have been measured ever since.

Hitler destroyed six million Jews. But he also destroyed anti-Semitism as a semirespectable Western creed: In the shadow of the Holocaust, theories about Jews that had circulated for centuries suddenly seemed sinister and even lunatic. The presence of journalists among Europe's liberators (including Edward R. Murrow, whose April, 1945, report from Buchenwald concentration camp was one of the most memorable of his career) ensured that the effect on popular attitudes would be permanently etched in photographs and film—a reminder for future generations that could be summoned up whenever the language of murderous anti-Semitism fills the mouths of dictators (as, in fact, is now the case in Iran).