Among the Truthers (39 page)

Three years later, my view on that has changed: The tendency to imagine that world events are secretly controlled by some malign force that is seeking to corrupt the “true” course of human history manifests itself in many different personality types. Now that I have returned from book leave, and have resumed my regular work as comment-pages editor at a daily newspaper, I commonly spot this motif in the submissions that land in my inbox—from militant anti-Zionists who blame Israel for every imaginable geopolitical upheaval, to global warming skeptics who imagine that Greenpeace and Barack Obama are in league to create a one-world government.

This realization has taught me to be careful about my own ideological commitments, as well: I sometimes catch myself using forms of logic or turns of phrase that echo the conspiracy theorists whom I'd interviewed. For this reason, the act of writing this book has had a gradually moderating view on my attitude toward politics, and in my judgments of others. It has made me more self-aware when I bend the rules of logic in the service of ideology or partisanship.

Writing this book has also made me conscious of some of the biases that afflict my profession. As I've already noted at several points, one of the factors that has encouraged the growth of conspiracism in recent decades is the gradual erosion of popular trust in the media. To a certain extent, this trend is inevitable in a 500-channel universe: The more the mediascape fragments into disparate niches, the less prestige and influence will be retained by general-interest news outlets. But mainstream journalists often encourage this phenomenon by distorting the truth or pushing an ideological agenda. Many leftists—to cite one example from among many—grew disenchanted with their beloved
New York Times
when they learned that the case for war in Iraq had been buttressed by reporter Judith Miller, whose stories about Iraqi WMD were based on what we now know to be exaggerated intelligence reports. Many conservatives, meanwhile, became disgusted with the mainstream media during the 2008 election campaign, when fawning coverage of Barack Obama was broadcast and printed side-by-side with mockery of Sarah Palin and condescension toward her supporters. If tens of millions of middle-class Americans find Glenn Beck and Michael Moore more credible than the purportedly objective analysis offered by CBS, CNN, and NPR, journalists have to ask themselves: “Do we have anything to do with that?”

In no way do I believe that the mainstream media should give air time to the promotion of full-fledged conspiracy theories of the type I've described in this book. But nor should we muzzle or vilify those whose opinions are merely disquieting. When liberal journalists smear Tea Party types as racists merely because they ask why Barack Obama remained a congregant of Jeremiah Wright, for instance, it reinforces suspicions that the media is helping the president hide something. By denying the grain of truth in many conspiracy theories, the media betrays its own institutional biases and squanders the credibility it needs to exercise editorial judgment in regard to truly nefarious lies, genuine bigotry, and outright conspiracy theories.

We speak of the Enlightenment in the singular. But as historian Philipp Blom emphasizes in his recent book
Wicked Company
, there actually were several enlightenments; each led by a man of ideas trying to put his distinct stamp on the complex philosophical ferment of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Yet all of them were bound up together by what we now describe as skepticism. Since the dawn of the scientific revolution, doctors, astronomers, and mathematicians had been challenging ancient dogmas through the exercise of reason and observation (the case of Galileo being only the most famous). Beginning with Descartes, this rigorous approach came to inform philosophy and even, as in the case of Voltaire's caustic response to the Great Lisbon Earthquake, theodicy.

In our own age, militant skepticism has become exalted as the truest mark of great intellect. Just about every conspiracy theorist I interviewed was very proud to tell me that they trust nothing they are told—and subject every claim to the most exacting scrutiny. This sounds intellectually noble—but in practice, it leads to a kind of nihilism, since there is no fact, historical event, or scientific phenomenon whose truth cannot, in some way, be brought into question by an inventive mind on the hunt for niggling “anomalies.” In modest doses, skepticism provides a shield against superstition and false dogma. But when skepticism is enshrined as a faith unto itself, skeptics often will conjure fantasies more ridiculous than the ones they debunk.

The Church of Skepticism has tempted many of our era's most popular pundits. Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, and Sam Harris all have become best-selling authors by delivering scathing manifestos against organized religion, which they present as a sort of collectively experienced mental illness. Hitchens, the most influential of the trio, says he “value[s] the Enlightenment above any priesthood or any sacred fetish-object.” Yet it is important to remember that the Enlightenment did not spell the end of serious Christian theology—and most of its giants likely would have been appalled by the exercise of their legacy to promote a Godless society.

Descartes, for instance, took care to divide the world into spiritual and material realms—making God lord of the former, and science lord of the latter. As for Voltaire—whose “moderate and deist form of Enlightenment thought” (in Blom's words) eventually would become synonymous with the Enlightenment itself—he believed that the existence of an “eternal, supreme, and intelligent being” could be established through the application of pure reason, and described religious belief as a necessary ingredient of a healthy society:

An atheist, provided he be sure of impunity so far as man is concerned, reasons and acts consistently in being dishonest, ungrateful, a slanderer, a robber, and a murderer. For if there is no God, this monster is his own god, and sacrifices to his purposes whatever he desires and whatever stands as an obstacle in his path. The most moving entreaties, the most cogent arguments have no more effect upon him than on a wolf thirsting for blood.

The philosopher was being perfectly sincere when he said “
Si Dieu n'existait pas, il faudrait l'inventer
”—if God did not exist, we would have to invent him.

Unlike Hitchens, Dawkins, Harris, and their followers, Voltaire understood that man cannot survive on skepticism alone—that society requires some creed or overarching national project that transcends mere intellect. When the appeal of traditional religion becomes weak, darker faiths assert themselves: including not only communism, fascism, tribalism, and strident nationalism, but also more faddish intellectual pathologies such as radical identity politics, anti-Americanism, and obsessive anti-Zionism. As I've argued, all of these provide rich soil for the seeds of conspiracism. As Europe is now learning, it is very difficult to maintain secular societies in a Godless limbo, fed by nothing but the materialist salves of wealth and the welfare state, without incubating malaise and ideological instability. As the Truthers show us, rootless thinkers eventually will find a devil to fear.

A healthy society is one in which faith and skepticism—both broadly defined—are in balance; where citizens feel a sense of trust and belonging in their society and its leading institutions, but also feel entitled to challenge prevailing biases, superstitions, and authority structures. The familiar historical phenomenon of faith overpowering skepticism is the problem of pre-Enlightenment societies. But since the murder of JFK, America has been dealing with the opposite, post-Enlightenment, problem: skepticism outdistancing faith. Like all the great traumas that America has suffered over the past half century, 9/11 has only made the yawning gap grow wider.

Diagnosing and fighting conspiracism is an important project, which is why I wrote this book. But ultimately, conspiracism is just one aspect of a larger crisis in American political culture; one that can be addressed only through a rehabilitation of the nation's public institutions. It is a large and difficult task—but also an urgent one. On 9/11, terrorists killed nearly 3,000 innocent people and destroyed the World Trade Center. Americans should not let their collective sense of truth be added to the list of casualties.

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Abdullah (king), 129

Abrams, Elliot, 302

Adbusters
, 298

African National Congress (ANC), 311

Aftonbladet
, 301

Ahmadinejad, Mahmoud, xxii, 157, 167

Ahmed, Nafeez Mosaddeq, 76

AIA.
See
American Institute of Architects

Akihito, Emperor, 129

Akol & Yoshii, 154

Allen, Arthur, 172, 173

Allen, Woody, 305

al-Qaeda, 6, 9, 15, 21, 76, 259, 299

Alten, Steve, 288–89

American Institute of Architects (AIA), 154–55

American Psychiatric Association, 317

ANC.
See
African National Congress

Anderson, Brian, 234–35

Andreas, Dwayne, 58

Annenberg Public Policy Center, 320

Anti-Cancer Club, 55

Anti-Defamation League, 169, 219, 303

Arafat, Yasser, 48, 295

Arizona State University, 271

Arouet, François-Marie.
See
Voltaire

Aryan Pride, 61

Aspen Institute, 58

Assange, Julian, xvii

ATF.
See
Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms

Atta, Mohammed, 12, 50

Auschwitz, 313

Avery, Dylan, 86, 104

Azande tribe, 205–7

 

Baader-Meinhof, 116

Bacon, Delia, 183–84

Bacon, Francis, xvi, 162, 183–84, 189, 195

Badillo, Manny, 174

Baigent, Michael, 73, 213

Baker, Russ, 51

Balsamo, Robert, 49, 110–11, 120

Bannon, Stephen K., 132

Baraka, Amiri, 168–69

Bard College, 261

Barkun, Michael, 21, 62

Barrett, Kevin, 167, 237–38, 286–94, 315

Barrett, Peter, 287

Barruel, Augustin, 29–30, 87

Basiago, Andrew D., 92

BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation), 114, 179

Beck, Glenn, 13, 110, 138–46, 240, 242, 303, 324

Benedict XVI, Pope, 242

Bennett, James, 192

Berlet, Chip, 215

Bernhard (prince), 57

Bernstein, Carl, 94, 248

Betts, Charles, 55, 56

Bilderberg Group, 15, 47–60, 96, 114, 201, 217, 221, 244, 278, 286, 316

Bill Gates Foundation, 58

Bin Laden, Osama, 4, 9, 17, 103, 167, 314

Black, Conrad, 57–58, 113

Blakeney, Joshua, 271

Blanchard, Brent, 20

Blom, Philipp, 324

Bloom, Allan, xvi

Bloomberg, Michael, 3

Blumenthal, Sid, 43

Boggs, Hale, 44

Boghardt, Thomas, 310

Bolsheviks, 53

Bonaparte, Napoleon, 87

Bottum, Joseph, 149

Bouvier family, 51

Bowman, Robert, 211, 293

BP (British Petroleum), 128, 243

Branch Davidians, 199

Brand, Dionne, 276

Brandes, Georg, 160, 161

Bratich, Jack, 272

Breitbart, Andrew, 126

Bridle, Susan, 269, 270

Brigham Young University, 192

British Broadcasting Corporation.
See
BBC

British Columbia Ministry of Health Library, 6

British Green Party, 179

British Petroleum.
See
BP

Brookings Institution, 58

Brown, Bridget, 56

Brown, Dan, xxi, 29, 48, 60, 181, 213, 215

Brown, Dave, 301

Brown and Root, 185, 186

Bryan, William Jennings, 83–84, 127

Brzezinski, Zbigniew, 117–18, 200–202

Buckley, William F. Jr., 191, 236

Bugliosi, Vincent, 42–44, 47, 309

Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF), 16

Burke, Edmund, 29

Burrows, Terry, 78, 111

Bush, George H. W., 8, 61, 87–88, 115

Bush, George W., xix, 5, 9, 14, 22, 83, 102, 138, 144, 242, 256, 283, 301

Bush, Jeb, 118

Bush, Marvin, 256

Bush, Prescott, 14

 

Cabet, Étienne, 212

Cable News Network.
See
CNN

Cable-Satellite Public Affairs Network.
See
C-SPAN

Cameron, James, 126

Campbell, Colin, 181

Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.
See
CBC

Canis Minor, 290

Cantril, Hadley, 144–45

Cantwell, Robert, 231

Carlyle Group, 13

Carter, Jimmy, 117, 293

Castro, Fidel, 42, 55, 106–9

CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation), 248

CBS (Columbia Broadcasting System), 324

CENTCOM (United States Central Command), 244

Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), xvii, 4, 6, 13, 15, 43, 44, 47–48, 49, 50, 51, 54–55, 88, 91, 106–9, 184

CFR.
See
Council on Foreign Relations

Chang, Iris, 166

Charles V (king), 75

Chavez, Hugo, 92, 157, 186, 297

Cheney, Dick, 6, 13, 66, 73, 102–3, 116, 118, 186, 229, 242

Chiang Kai Shek, 165

Chomsky, Noam, 18, 102, 156, 167, 261, 298, 315

Chossudovsky, Michel, 11

Christian Identity, 61

CIA.
See
Central Intelligence Agency

Citizen Investigation Team, 194

Claremont School of Theology, 104, 154, 193

Clarke, Steve, 21

Clinton, Bill, 43, 86, 118, 119, 235, 316

Clinton, Hillary, 73

Cloward, Richard, 169

Club of Rome, 58

CNN (Cable News Network), 11, 125, 170, 238, 242, 324

Cobain, Kurt, 47

Cohn, Norman, 65, 70, 78, 134, 210, 291

Colbert, Stephen, 138, 202

Colorado Public Television, 152

Columbia Broadcasting System.
See
CBS

Columbia University, 169, 170, 243, 295

Committee for State Security.
See
KGB

Committee to Investigate Communist Influences at Vassar College, 40

Committee to Re-elect the President, 20–21

Connally, John, 45

Connell, Michael, 11

Cooper, John Sherman, 44

Cooper, Milton William, 72–73

Corbett, James, 257

Corsi, Jerome, 242

Coughlin, Charles, 37–38, 85–86

Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), 2, 58, 60, 200, 201, 242, 286

Counter Intelligence Program, 219–20

CounterPunch, 240

Coventry City, 179

Cronkite, Walter, xviii

C-SPAN (Cable-Satellite Public Affairs Network), 123

 

Daily Kos, 240

Daly, Mary, 268–70

Dawkins, Richard, 325, 326

deHaven-Smith, Lance, 271

DeMint, Jim, 122

Democrats, 4, 18, 83, 128, 301

Democratic National Committee Headquarters, 20–21

Democratic Underground, 240

Denison University, 272

Derrida, Jacques, 261–64

Dershowitz, Alan, 302

Descartes, René, xvi, 10, 324–25

Dewdney, Alexander Keewatin, 89, 184

Diana (princess), 47, 48

Dickens, Charles, 296

Directorate of Propaganda and Agitation of the Central Committee, 253–54

Dobbs, Lou, 242

Domitian, Emperor, 135

Donahue, Phil, 313

Donnelly, Ignatius, 36–37, 182, 187–90, 220

Dreyfus, Alfred, 20–21

Dulles, Allen, 44

 

Eastern Illinois University, 228

Eisenhower, Dwight, 32, 41, 232

Elizabeth II (queen), 180

Elliott, Brenda, 247–48

Estulin, Daniel, 15, 57–60, 96, 114, 186, 217, 248

European Union (EU), 58, 63

Evans, Margaret, 25–26

Evans-Pritchard, Edward Evan, 205–7

Ewing, Patrick, 234

 

Facebook, 237, 254

Factcheck.org, 320

Falk, Richard, 313

Fanon, Franz, 265–66

Farah, Joseph, 31, 121–24, 134, 170, 304, 305

Farrakhan, Louis, 163, 169

Fayed, Dodi, 47, 48

FBI.
See
Federal Bureau of Investigation

FCC.
See
Federal Communications Commission

FDA.
See
Food and Drug Administration

Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), 46, 82, 116, 169, 219–20, 227, 228

Federal Communications Commission (FCC), 235

Federal Emergency Management Agency.
See
FEMA

Federalists, 35

FederalJack.com, 245–46

Federal Reserve, 2, 13, 82, 244, 249

Feith, Douglas, 302

FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency), xix, 62, 102, 197, 243, 257

Fetzer, James, 50

Figes, Orlando, 166

Fisk, Robert, xxiii

Fitzgerald, Craig, 2–3

Fletcher, Victor, 293

Food and Drug Administration (FDA), 172, 176

Ford, Gerald, 44, 293

Ford, Henry, 72

Foucault, Michel, 263

FOX News, 235, 236, 240, 242, 303

Fox Piven, Frances, 169

Free, Lloyd, 144–45

Freemasons, xxi, 29, 35, 41, 72, 83, 87–88, 229, 293

Freemason Secret Society, 58–59

Free Republic, 240

Freire, Paulo, 266, 273

Freud, Sigmund, 160

Friedman, Milton, 75

FrontPage Magazine, 158

Fukuyama, Francis, xv

Fulford, Robert, 166

 

Gaddafi, Moammar, 50

Gage, Richard, xxi–xxii, 100, 104, 105, 151–55, 159, 211

Galati, Rocco, 114

Galileo, 324

Gallup Poll, 144–45

Galton, Francis, 247, 257

Gandhi, Mohandas Karamchand, 192

Ganser, Daniele, 113

Garofalo, Janeane, 128

Garrison, Jim, 43

Gasset, Jose Ortega y, 149

Gates, Bill, 58

Gaylord Opryland Hotel, 124–25

Gearhart, Sally Miller, 269

George III (king), 34

Georgia Institute of Technology, 273

Gibbs, Robert, 157

Gidion, Gabriele, 41–42

Giffords, Gabrielle, xxii

Giuliani, Rudy, 202

Godwin, Mike, 240

Gold, Jon, 174

Goldberg, Bernard, xviii

Goldberger, Paul, 48–49

Goldman Sachs, 128

Goldwater, Barry, 251

Google, xviii, 243–44, 249

GOP (Grand Old Party), 126, 202

Gorbachev Foundation, 58

Goya, Francisco, 301

Grand Old Party.
See
GOP

Green, Mark, 288

Greenberg, Hank, 58

Green Party, British, 179

Greenpeace, 323

Griffin, David Ray, 6, 49–50, 91, 104, 119, 154, 190, 193, 230

Grobman, Alex, 166, 313

The Guardian
, 14, 240

Guelph University, 10–11

Guevara, Che, 295

Gurion, David Ben, 295

 

HAARP.
See
High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program

Haass, Richard, 2, 286

Halcyon Company, 60

Hall, Anthony J., 168, 271

Halliburton, 13, 185

Hamlet
, 160–61

Hampton, Fred, 43

Hansen, Dallas, 13–14

Hanson, Jay, 80

Harris, Sam, 325, 326

Harvard Law School, 238–39

Harvard University, 145, 261

Hasan, Nidal Malik, 244

Hearst, William Randolph, 231

Heaven's Gate, 199

Heinz, Jack, 58

Helms, Richard, 271

Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation, 145

Hereford United, 179

Herman, Arthur, 55

Hersh, Seymour, 54

Herzl, Theodor, 67–69, 81, 96

High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program (HAARP), 92

Hiss, Alger, 232

Hitchens, Christopher, 325, 326

Hitler, Adolf, xx, 14, 30, 41, 48, 58–59, 69, 85, 101, 167, 240, 251–52, 291–92

Hofstadter, Richard, 34–35, 41, 231, 232–33

Hoggatt, Greg, 99

Homer, 207, 208

Hoover, J. Edgar, 54, 101

Horowitz, David, 122

Huffington Post, 240

Hufschmid, Eric, 219

Hughes, Lesley, 4, 5

Hunt, E. Howard, 13

Hurricane Katrina, 75

Hussein, Saddam, 112

Huxley, Aldous, 53

Hydrick, Rick, 142

 

ICC.
See
International Criminal Court

Icke, David, 72, 73, 91, 179–81, 182

Ignotus, Miles, 117

Illuminati, 3, 29–30, 35, 41, 57, 60–61, 72, 73–74, 83, 87, 180, 221, 293

IMAIM.
See
Industrial Military Academic Intelligence Media complex

IMF.
See
International Monetary Fund

Industrial Military Academic Intelligence Media complex (IMAIM), 97

Infowars
, 17

Instapundit, 240

Institute for Policy Studies, 58

International Criminal Court (ICC), 63

International Monetary Fund (IMF), 13

Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), 13

Irving, David, 288

ISI.
See
Inter-Services Intelligence

Ivy League, xviii, 265, 302

Izvestia
, 310

 

Jackson, La Toya, 48

Jackson, Michael, 48

James I (king), 111

James Randi Educational Foundation, 220, 314, 319

James VI (king), 111

Jarrah, Ziad, 50–51

Jenkins, Ken, 40, 99–106, 112, 180, 213, 215

Jersey Girls, 21–22

Jesuit General, 220

Jesus Christ, 192, 213, 214

Jews, 78, 81, 83, 85–88, 93, 96, 124, 149, 162, 167, 169, 180, 210, 212, 214, 218–20, 252, 262–63, 269, 278, 285–307, 321

John Birch Society (JBS), 30, 40, 41, 73, 130, 319

Johnson, Lyndon B., 112, 250–51

Joint Chiefs of Staff, 106

Joly, Maurice, 69

Jones, Alex, 2, 16–19, 60, 63, 76–77, 79, 101, 113, 197, 221, 286, 292

Jones, Ernest, 162

Jones, LeRoi.
See
Baraka, Amiri

Jones, Steven, xxii, 192, 211

Jones, Van, xxii

 

Kagan, Robert, 118

Kaiser, Henry J., 145