Among the Truthers

Filmmaker Teace Snyder has produced a decently-acted 20-minute 9/11-Truth-themed melodrama about a father and his 10-year-old daughter who begin fighting after she delivers a speech to her elementary school class in which she claims the Sept. 11 attacks were an inside job. The two reconcile when the father watches the 9/11 Truth web links she had sent him, and he (apparently) becomes a convert.

It’s an interesting piece of propaganda because the filmmaker avoids almost any reference to the technical aspects of 9/11 Truth mythology — focusing on the emotional aspects of a father and daughter trying to deal with the death of her mother (his wife).

Blindfold from Teace Snyder on Vimeo.

On the New York Times web site, James Kirchick has a very good piece about Ron Paul’s penchant for conspiracy theories. Here is part of it:

In a 1990 C-Span appearance, taped between Congressional stints, Paul was asked by a caller to comment on the “treasonous, Marxist, alcoholic dictators that pull the strings in our country.” Rather than roll his eyes, Paul responded,“there’s pretty good evidence that those who are involved in the Trilateral Commission and the Council on Foreign Relations usually end up in positions of power. And I believe this is true.”

Paul then went on to stress the negligible differences between various “Rockefeller Trilateralists.” The notion that these three specific groups — the Trilateral Commission, the Council on Foreign Relations and the Rockefeller family — run the world has been at the center of far-right conspiracy theorizing for a long time, promoted especially by the extremist John Birch Society, whose 50^th anniversary gala dinner Paul keynoted in 2008.

Paul is proud of his association with the society, telling the Times Magazine in 2007, “I have a lot of friends in the John Birch Society. They’re generally well educated, and they understand the Constitution.” In 1998, Paul appeared in a Birch Society documentary which lauded a bill he had introduced to force American withdrawal from the United Nations. With ominous music in the background and images of United Nations peacekeepers patrolling deserted streets, the film warned that the world body would destroy American private property rights, replace the Constitution with the United Nations Charter and burn churches to the ground.

Paul has frequently attacked the alleged New World Order that “elitist” cabals, like the Trilateral Commission and the Rockefeller family, in conjunction with “globalist” organizations, like the United Nations and the World Bank, wish to foist on Americans. In a 2006 column published on the Web site of Lew Rockwell (his former Congressional chief of staff and the man widely suspected of being the ghostwriter of the newsletters, although he denied it to me), Paul addressed the alleged “Nafta Superhighway.” This is a system of pre-existing and proposed roads from Mexico to Canada that conspiracy theorists claim is part of a nefarious transnational attempt to open America’s borders and merge the United States with its neighbors into a supra-national entity. Paul wrote that the ultimate goal of the project was an “integrated North American Union” — yet one more bugbear of conspiracy theorists — which “would represent another step toward the abolition of national sovereignty altogether.”

In his newsletters, Paul expressed support for far-right militia movements, which at the time saw validation for their extreme, anti-government beliefs in events like the F.B.I. assault on the Branch Davidians and at Ruby Ridge. Paul was eager to fan their paranoia and portray himself as the one man capable of doing anything about it politically. Three months before the Oklahoma City bombing, in an item for the Ron Paul Survival Report titled, “10 Militia Commandments,” he offered advice to militia members, including that they, “Keep the group size down,” “Keep quiet and you’re harder to find,” “Leave no clues,” “Avoid the phone as much as possible,” and “Don’t fire unless fired upon, but if they mean to have a war, let it begin here.”

The closest Paul has come in his public statements to endorsing violence against the government was during an interview in 2007, when he was asked about Ed and Elaine Brown, a New Hampshire couple who had refused to pay federal income taxes. In the summer of that year, they instigated a five-month armed standoff with United States marshals, whom Ed Brown accused of being part of a “Zionist, Illuminati, Freemason movement.” Echoing a speech he had just delivered on the House floor, Paul praised the pair as “heroic” “true patriots,” likened them to Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr., and compared them favorably to “zombies,” that is, those of us who “just go along” and pay income tax.

Finally, there’s Paul’s stance on the most pervasive conspiracy theory in America today, the idea that the 9/11 terrorist attacks were perpetrated not by Al Qaeda, but by the federal government or some other shadowy force. While Paul has never explicitly endorsed this claim, there is a reason so many 9/11 “truthers” flock to his campaign. In a recent YouTube video posted by a leading 9/11 conspiracy group, “We Are Change,” Paul is asked, “Why won’t you come out about the truth about 9/11?”

Rather than answer, say, that the “9/11 Commission already investigated the attacks,” or ask the questioner what particular element of “the truth” remained unknown, Paul knowingly replied, “Because I can’t handle the controversy, I have the I.M.F., the Federal Reserve to deal with, the I.R.S. to deal with, no because I just have more, too many things on my plate. Because I just have too much to do.”

Read the rest here.

Editor’s note: We too rarely hear from former conspiracy theorists, who are in the best position to teach us how people can escape from the conspiracist rabbit hole. That’s why Dan Smeenk’s story is worth reading. (The secret of his own escape? A self-aware, analytical mind, plus sensible parents and friends who stood by him patiently while he worked things out for himself.) — J.Kay

My Journey from Truther to Non-Truther

By Dan Smeenk

The lesser and the greatest evil of conspiracy theories is that most of the people they manage to convince are young kids often in their teens and early 20’s, before they’ve had a chance to really experience and understand the world beyond their immediate community and their own personal lives.  These kids are particularly vulnerable to picking up conspiracy theories because they have often never been taught how to critically examine what the media, any media, tell them.  They are not at an age where they should even be expected to have a basic knowledge of how political and major business institutions work, never mind actual experience seeing it operate for themselves.

However, because young people tend to experiment, and because they tend not to have experience set them into lifelong convictions, they are also easiest to pull out of the rabbit hole if they’ve started to go down.  This provides at least a partial window of how I viewed the world as a 15 year old in the spring of 2007.   For about two years, from this time to the summer of 2009, I became fixated by the world of Internet conspiracy theories.

My journey from truther to non-truther, or more accurately, a conspiracy theorist to within the realm of sanity, was not a script made for Hollywood; nor was it a story that could’ve come from the most inspired imagination of William Shakespeare.  Most of this journey, like with many conspiracy theorists, was through my own head and in complete isolation in front of a computer, with some vague outside contacts and even a small tint of activism in part of a Ron Paul meet-up group.  Conspiracies never ruined my life, but the initial belief, as well as the subsequent relinquishing of my beliefs, gave me a good slap in the face to how ignorant and arrogant I was and have the potential to be.

Let’s start from the beginning. Two important events happened to me at this time.

The first was the start of the 2008 election campaign.  I was not drawn in at this time like many of my peers by Barack Obama, but by a Republican: a charismatic, seventy-two year old Congressman and physician named Ron Paul.  I had been led to Paul through references from other independent Internet bloggers.  Paul had gained a mass following on the Internet in the earliest stages of his campaign, and at one point had been the 42^nd most subscribed YouTube channel and one of Technorati’s most searched terms for his maverick positions in the Republican Party.  The earliest strong political conviction I ever held was that the war in Iraq was a catastrophic foreign policy blunder.   Ron Paul agreed with that position, and that initially thoroughly impressed me, particularly as no other candidates in the Republican Party had done so. Continue reading →

I finally got around to watching this great New York Times video demystifying the famous “Umbrella Man” from the JFK Zapruder film. Well worth the six minutes it takes to watch.

A Canadian conspiracy theorist named Pepper Chomsky says he has spent 16 years writing a psychically-inspired book about the “mysterious” circumstances surrounding the death of John Lennon. Here is an excerpt from a promotional mass mailing he’s sending around to fellow Canadian writers:

John Lennon was obviously aware of the involvement of British Intelligence, especially MI5, from the fallout after Brian Epstein’s so called “suicide”, that sent the Beatles scurrying for safe-haven — Paul to Scotland and John to Amsterdam, then to Canada, and eventually to the USA.
Upon entering the United States, John Lennon was hugely inconvenienced and aggravated by the continual surveillance and humiliation by US and British secret forces, FBI and MI6 respectively, who were obviously co-operating based on the FBI files released to Jon Wiener, Professor of History at the University of California Irvine, and author of the book “Gimme Some Truth: The John Lennon FBI Files.” Lennon said at the time to reporters, “I’d open the door. There’d be guys on the other side of the street. I’d get into my car, and they’d be following me in a car. Not hiding. They wanted me to see that I was being followed.” He went on further to say, “We knew we were being wire-tapped. There was a helluva lot of guys coming in to fix the phones.”

Ronnie Hawkins famed bandleader and Arkansas music legend “The Hawk” had moved to Canada in the 1960’s and had set up an organization of incredibly talented musicians from his private farm, just north of Toronto. It was Ronnie and loyal wife Wanda who took in the ill-guided Lennons, John and Yoko, who were fugitives from the persecution that they had received in the UK after Brian Epstein’s suspicious suicide. Ronnie told me that, “When John Lennon moved in, John had numerous phone lines installed from the road, that was almost a mile away. The phone lines ran over the fields and Lennon was always worried about getting a “clean” line out as his conversations were almost always monitored. There were constant clicks on the lines, indicating surveillance. Photos taken at the time, showed a worried John Lennon and Yoko Ono almost paranoid in their fear and anger that Richard Nixon was adamantly not allowing them entry into the United States. They had planned to share in the experience of the Woodstock Peace and Music Festival. For Nixon, Woodstock had already become a national disaster and he didn’t fancy John Lennon adding to the LSD mayhem. Continue reading →

McMaster University sociology professor Neil Mclaughlin has a forthcoming paper in the journal Cultural Sociology titled: The International Circulation of Attacks and the Reputational Consequences of Local Context: Soros’ difficult reputation in Russia, Post-Soviet Lithuania and the United States.

Here is an excerpt, provided with the permission of the author:

Soros’ reputational history in US (and the West in general) stretches back over the past forty years of his financial and philanthropic activities, but there was a recent shift related to American domestic politics after 2000. Soros always retained an interest in American domestic politics and social policy despite the fact that the major focus of his philanthropy tended to be international. He was a critic of America’s “war on drugs,” a crusader against urban poverty, and someone critical of the “denial of death” in Western societies.[i] Beginning in the early years of the 21^st century, however, Soros began to accelerate his funding of projects in the United States on domestic issues.  The election of Bush in 2000 and the polarized call for a “war on terror” since the events of 9/11 served as a catalyst for Soros’s full-scale American philanthropic involvement. Soros developed a reputation as a “Renegade Democrat” as just the kind of wealthy culturally elite and socially liberal Democrat that populist and conservative Christian Republicans loved to hate. The massive spending that he engaged in to defeat Bush in the 2004 Presidential Race (over $24 million) solidified his new difficult reputation.

The books and essays which Soros wrote just before and in the aftermath of 9/11 moved away from a focus on opening up the Soviet Union, and increasingly revolved around issues such as “reforming global capitalism,” “globalization,” defeating George W. Bush in 2004 and “the consequences of the war on terror.”[ii] Up until this time, Soros had been a “non-partisan” Democrat who, while having links to the Clinton White House, supported a variety of causes and moderate Republicans. The battle between John Kerry and George W. Bush, however, marked a drastic change in Soros’ approach (Kaufman, 2002).

Lukewarm over Kerry but passionately opposed to Bush, Soros began strategizing directly with partisan Democrats. He also gave enormous amounts of money to 527s, a new form of political activity that became common after the campaign reform of the early years of the 21^st century. 527s were a new form of “soft money” organizations that cannot give money directly to candidates but funds issue based advocacy.  Soros’ reputation soon became dominated, at least in the United States, by his association with Hillary Clinton (he had once visited Haiti with her) and Barack Obama whom he supported in the 2008 primaries.

There is a soft and a hard version of Soros’ reputation as a “Renegade Democrat.”  For centrist Democrats, moderate Republicans and the journalistic establishment in the United States, Soros was not a team player from the perspective of the political establishment. Too independent to be controlled and too visible to be ignored, Soros was a valued contributor to the cause with deep pockets but also a potentially notorious supporter (Fine, 2006).  Since the Democratic Party depended on the votes of the poor, working and middle classes among American voters to gain electoral success, Soros’ vast wealth and cosmopolitan commitments was a liability.

There was also a hard and more sinister version of this reputation, however, represented most prominently in David Horowitz and Richard Poe’s The Shadow Party (2006). A harsh conspiratorial and paranoid rant, Horowitz and Poe make the case that Soros is at the centre of a sinister plot to promote the drug culture of the 1960s, a soft on crime approach, gun control, the rationing of health care linked to euthanasia for the elderly, an anti-American defeatism in face of Islamist backed terrorism, the domination of American politics by wealthy liberal elites, mass immigration and the loss of national sovereignty. Additionally, Bill O’Reilly of Fox called Soros a “sleazoid” and someone who is “as far left as you can get without moving to Havana” (Quoted in Morton, 2004). Even more outrageously, Dennis Hastert, the Republican speaker of the House at the time suggested that Soros funded his philanthropy from drug money (Krugman, 2006), a theme that was later picked up in Lithuania.  More recently, Glenn Beck took attacks on Soros to a new level.  Beck’s Fox News TV during 2009 and 2010 featured segments making Soros, as well as social scientists the late Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven, part of an alleged Obama-led socialist conspiracy to ruin the American economy. Continue reading →

Here is a transcript of the speech I gave at Bard College’s Arendt Center. For those readers who might be interested in my general take on conspiracy theories, but don’t want to slog through my book, this provides a good 5,000-word summary.

October 28, 2011

Truthtelling: Democracy in an Age Without Facts

The Hannah Arendt Center for Politcs and the Humanities

Bard College

Annandale-on-Hudson, NY

Lewis Lapham, who spoke from this podium earlier in the day, said something interesting. He said: “The truth doesn’t have a big fan base. It’s not a popular product.” That really echoed for me because that is exactly what I heard from certain publishers when I pitched my book about conspiracy theories. At first, they were excited: “Oh, you’re writing a book about conspiracy theories. Great! You believe the lizards are taking over … or maybe some kind of zombie apocalypse?” I said: “No, no, no this is a book against conspiracy theories — a book about how we all have to be more rational.” The publishers became much less excited. They said, “Well, it sounds a little dry.” But then, Adam Bellow, an editor at Harper Collins, took a chance on me. And for that, I am grateful. The result was my book Among the Truthers: A Journey Through America’s Growing Conspiracist Underground, which came out earlier in 2011.

I think it is important to talk about this subject at a conference dedicated to the subject of “truth-telling,” such as this — because conspiracy theories are both a symptom and a cause of a media culture and an Internet culture that promotes nonsense, for reasons I’m going to explain.

But, before I get into the theory, I’d like to give you a case study, which involves something that happened after my book was published. The case study involves Anders Breivik, who killed dozens of people in Norway in July of 2011.  At the time, I was on a book tour. But one night, I instinctively went back to a lot of the conspiracy theory websites that I had used to research my book, because I was curious what the conspiracy theorists were saying about this horrible mass slaughter. Of course, we all know the truth of it. The killer composed a turgid 1,400 page manifesto explaining his dark motives — no mystery there. But still, I was interested in what the conspiracy theorists were saying about what they imagined the real story was.

What was interesting to me was that the conspiracy theories about the Norway killings actually broke down into three different sub-genres, and I’m going to go briefly through them.

The first conspiracy theory was that the Norway shootings were actually a clever plot by Muslims to discredit cultural conservatives in Europe. The lead on this particular conspiracy theory was taken by a website that some of you may know called WorldNetDaily. It has become infamous as the clearing-house for Barack Obama Birther conspiracy theories, but they also dabble in other conspiracies.  This is what appeared a day or two after the Norway shooting. Continue reading →

… This John Birch Society video about Gingrich is making the rounds of the right-wing conspiracist discussion boards.

Upshot: Gingrich has supported foreign aid, Nelson Rockefeller, free trade with China — all of which supposedly tells us that he is a secret agent of the communists.

After wading through endless conspiracy theories about how Barack Obama is the anti-Christ, of the False Prophet, or some such, it is refreshing to find someone who makes these accusations in regard to a Republican: Herman, Cain to be precise. Check out the evidence:

Herman Cain fulfills the prophecy of the Anti Christ.

The name “Herman” is from Hari-Mann translated from the old Germanic ‘Army Man’ or ‘Leader of the Army’.

In Greek and Jewish translations, “Cain” refers to the Son of Satan:

In the Greek New Testament, Cain is referred to as εκ του πονηρου.In at least one translation this is rendered “from the evil one”, while others have “of the evil one.” Some interpreters take this to mean that Cain was literally the son of the serpent in the Garden of Eden. In Jewish tradition, the serpent (Hebrew nahash נחש) from the Garden of Eden was father to firstborn Cain.

Herman Cain’s full name means Leader of the Army of Satan.

Herman Cain’s birthday is December 13, 1945. In 1945 Bricha (“flight”), an organization of former partisans and ghetto fighters, began smuggling Jewish holocaust survivors from Eastern Europe to Italy and from there on to Palestine. This was the beginning of the ‘Birth Pangs’ leading to the State of Israel and during which the Anti-Christ would be born.

Herman Cain’s platform relies on his 999 tax plan. Inverted = 666. The 999 Tax Plan encompasses a Tax ID that all people will have to use as even the very poor will have to file papers. As American ideas tend to spread world-wide this may become the norm for the rest of the Earth.

Check out the rest here.

It’s hard to think of a more far-fetched conspiracy than one that involves Israel and Iran. But nothing is too far-fetched for the anti-Semites at the Veterans Today web site. According to Veterans Today, the focus of the Israel-Iran nexus will be to boost sagging oil prices.

Interested readers might want to surf the comments section, which include Jew-hating gems like this: “You’re just figuring this out now??? If you look real deep, you’ll find most of Iran’s ruling elites are nothing more than anti-persian and aryan theocrats. many of them, have registered addresses in Knightsbridge (Rothschild’s London Domain). Hell, even their President was a born a jew, who now imprisons bloggers for saying so. There are thousands of Jews living quite alright in Iran, with no fear of being ‘targeted’ by the government.”

In response to one of my recent columns about Shakespeare conspiracy theories, I got a note from author Lev Raphael, who has written a fascinating article about a conspiracy theory that, I confess, I had never heard of. Raphael’s article appeared on the BiblioBuffet web site. I am reposting it here with his permission.

By Lev Raphael

I’ve been enjoying Shakespeare since elementary school, starting with Charles and Mary Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare and then by gradual immersion in the plays via television, classroom readings, and ultimately stage performances in New York, some of them as school field trips, all of them vivid and exciting. I can still recall the shock of a nude scene in Troilus and Cressida, and then later on when I studied Shakespeare in a college theater class, the thrill of Michael Moriarity’s insidiously evil Richard III, and the roller coaster ride of young Sam Waterston’s blistering Hamlet. That was the first time I’d seen Hamlet played so full of rage, and years later when I’d watch Waterston on “Law & Order,” the poster from that play would often be like a pentimento for me.

Living in Michigan, I became a member of Canada’s Stratford Shakespeare Festival and some years—when the dollar was high—have made three or four visits a season. I’ve now seen all of Shakespeare’s plays at least once in performance, including the most obscure ones, and I’ve seen quite a few half a dozen times. Oddly enough, the Troilus I saw most recently also had a nude scene, and this daring production ended with Nine Inch Nails’ “Closer.”

In all these years, though I’ve read books about Shakespeare and Elizabethan England, books like Harold Bloom’s Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human and Stephen J. Greenblatt’s Will in the World, I’ve ignored the so-called controversy over authorship, the claims that Shakespeare couldn’t have produced such a vast, astonishing oeuvre and that someone else must have been the author. An aristocrat, perhaps, or maybe even a team of them. Somebody, anybody but Shakespeare.

I think of this strange phenomenon as “Shakespeare Denial,” and it’s just seemed too silly, too counter-intuitive to pay attention to. But last month a magazine thrust the story into my face. There on the cover of Reform Judaism, a glossy quarterly I get because of my synagogue membership and otherwise wouldn’t see, was the claim that there’s a “mystery” about Shakespeare. Underneath ran a query: were his plays written by a Jewish woman?

Pretty dramatic stuff, but the theory is fallacious, and the story is deeply flawed. Continue reading →

There’s a movement afoot to bring the Occupy protestors to the rebuilt WTC Building 7, where they can join the “millions of citizens and 1,600 courageous architects and engineers [who] are demanding an investigation into the suspect destruction of this skyscraper.”

It was supposed to take place on Nov 19 and 20. But now that Zuccotti Park’s been cleared, who knows whether it will happen at all.

You can’t make this stuff up. In fact, it’s hard to even summarize in a coherent way. Suffice it to say that there’s a fellow named Mario Apuzzo, who cites the work of Martha Trowbridge, in arguing that Barack Obama might actually be the love child of Malcolm X and a woman named Jo Ann Newman.

As one of my correspondents noted in an email: “This theory is a bittersweet one for birthers, since, while it reveals Obama to be a flim-flam man and a Manchurian candidate planted by Black Muslims,  it implies that Obama was born in NYC and his father was a U.S. citizen, which would make him (i) a U.S. citizen at birth (and thus qualified to become president under the traditional definition of “natural-born citizen”) and (ii) someone with no other citizenship at birth under the laws of any other country, thus making him eligible even in the eyes of those misnamed “birthers” who don’t care where Obama was born because they insist that he can’t be a natural-born citizen because his father was the citizen of another country when Obama was born.”

Here’s something that arrived in my AmongTheTruthers inbox the other day:

I am wondering what are your thoughts by the admitted links between Alex Jones and Ron Paul’s own Campaign for Liberty?  There are a lot of videos of Alex himself on his own YouTube channel admitting that the Paul staff of the Campaign for Liberty regularly meet with him….and there’s also an old 2007 white supremacist forum of Bill White, the neo-Nazi leader admitting having meetings with Ron Paul on policy issues. The Ron Paul people remind me of how the National Socialist German Workers’ Party began their takeover of Germany by exploiting Germany’s economic crisis….sadly I’m seeing something similar happening here except being disguised as a Campaign for “Liberty”.

While researching Among The Truthers, I found a very strong correlation between Ron Paul supporters and Alex Jones listeners. That is not surprising, of course: Both men are right-wing libertarians who believe the United States has fallen under the illegitimate control of corporate and banking syndicates, led by the Federal Reserve in particular. The main difference between the two men is that Jones is a full-blown conspiracy theorist who is obsessed with everything from 9/11 to JFK. Paul, on the other hand, is a quasi-legitimate politician, who is forced to keep such conspiracy theories at arm’s length — though who knows what he actually believes on these subjects.

As for links to bigots, James Kirchick did a very fine piece on Ron Paul’s not-so-savoury past, which you can read here. In particular, this is what Kirchick concluded about pre-1999-era newsletters published under Ron Paul’s name: “What they reveal are decades worth of obsession with conspiracies, sympathy for the right-wing militia movement, and deeply held bigotry against blacks, Jews, and gays. In short, they suggest that Ron Paul is not the plain-speaking antiwar activist his supporters believe they are backing — but rather a member in good standing of some of the oldest and ugliest traditions in American politics.”

On the other hand, none of this should be surprising. In my experience, the sort of folks who rail obsessively against bankers (and, in particular, “international bankers”) sometimes are prone to playing footsie with actual bigots — and anti-Semites in particular — since their political mythologies are so similar: i.e. the specter of world domination by a mysterious cabal of financiers operating in the shadows.

The path from this theory to The Protocols of the Elders of Zion is a short one.

‘There are three infallible signs of the crank,” Catholic intellectual Joseph Bottum has written. “The first is that he has a theory about the Jews. The second is that he has a theory about money. And the third is that he has a theory about Shakespeare.”

Very true. Take, for instance, Ignatius Donnelly, perhaps the greatest crank in American history. In the late 19th century, Donnelly wrote books such as Ragnarok, which argued that Atlantis was destroyed by a passing comet and that the contours of our Earth were formed by splatterings of extraterrestrial “gravel.” He also believed the secret identity of the Great Bard could be discovered by counting and multiplying all the different words in his plays. In his crank manifesto, The Great Cryptogram, he claimed to have discovered a secret cipher that proved Francis Bacon was the true author.

But as Columbia University Shakespeare scholar James Shapiro explained in his fascinating 2010 book Contested Will, plenty of non-cranks have gone down the “anti-Stratfordian” rabbit hole as well — including Mark Twain, Helen Keller and Henry James.

And then there was Sigmund Freud, one of the small handful of thinkers whose influence on Western culture arguably can be said to stand alongside Shakespeare’s.

For Freud, it all began in 1898 …

Read the rest here.

A new conspiracy theory from Japan, via American Free Press :

A leading Japanese journalist recently made two incredible claims about the Fukushima power plant that suffered a nuclear meltdown in March 2011, sending shockwaves around the world. First, the former editor of a national newspaper in Japan says the U.S. and Israel knew Fukushima had weapons-grade uranium and plutonium that were exposed to the atmosphere after a massive tsunami wave hit the reactor. Second, he  contends that Israeli intelligence sabotaged the reactor in retaliation for Japan’s support of an independent Palestinian state.

Read the rest here … but only if you don’t mind giving traffic to a hate site like AFP.

Back in late 2009, when many still believed that Sarah Palin was the future of American politics, left-wing filmmakers Chase Whiteside and Erick Stoll took their camera to a Borders book store in Columbus, Ohio, where the former Alaska governor was signing copies of her book Going Rogue. Whiteside and Stoll went up and down the line-up of Palin fans, conducting brief interviews, and then uploaded edited snippets to YouTube.

Surprise, surprise: The interviewees all sound like idiots. “She’s the epi … epitome of conservative-ness,” says one dazed-seeming fellow in a Pittsburgh Steelers jacket. “She gonna’ get the presidency!” Another woman added that Palin stood for “cutting taxes, making a more, um, you know, entre-pe-noorial, um, just, um, like, conducive environment for our country, you know?”

The video goes on for eight minutes like this. It quickly gets tedious. And we don’t really learn anything from it: No matter our place on the political spectrum, most of us sound dumb when someone suddenly puts a microphone in front of us and asks for our opinion.

Nevertheless, the Borders video got almost 2-million hits. And you can see why: It confirmed, in capsule form, the stereotypes that tens of millions of liberals have about Sarah Palin.

The political act of explaining why one likes, or doesn’t like, a particular politician or policy once required thought and argument — effort, in other words. Now, it’s so much easier: You just paste a single YouTube link to your Facebook page, and you’re done. On to the next issue.

Two years later, exactly the same trick is underway on the other side of the political spectrum: Lazy conservatives who instinctively are repelled by the Occupy Wall Street movement, but can’t be bothered to intellectually engage with the issue, are circulating their own YouTube hits — alleging not just stupidity and bad hygiene, but also anti-Semitism. A popular one (200,000 hits so far) called “Anti-Semitic Protester at Occupy Wall Street — LA” features a woman who declares: “The Zionist Jews who are running these big banks and our Federal Reserve … they need to be run out of this country.”

Armed with video snippets such as these, an American conservative group is running a slick ad suggesting that the Occupy movement is basically just one big Democratic-supported anti-Semitic jamboree. ” Links to their ad, and the accompanying anti-Semitism claim, are all over my Twitter feed. Opponents of Occupy don’t even have to watch the video: They can confirm all their pre-existing biases about the movement in 140 characters or less.

Read the rest here.

Turns out they’re into 7/7 conspiracy theories as well.

A century ago, a prominent Russian anarchist named Peter Kropotkin defined his creed as a “theory of life and conduct under which society is conceived without government.” In such a society, order is created “not by submission to law, or by obedience to any authority, but by free agreements concluded between the various groups.”

In practice, however, anarchism always leads to chaos and nihilistic violence — or to dictatorships imposed by those who claim to represent the masses’ true desires.

The Occupy Wall Street protestors deployed in Manhattan’s Zuccotti Park provide a capsule case study.

In a fascinating report filed last Thursday, New York Magazine’s Alex Klein found that the protesters had splintered on the question of music. Many of the Occupiers, apparently, have been passing their time with daily 10-hour drum sessions. The tom toms help keep up morale, apparently. But they also anger those protesters who are trying to sleep, and have disrupted classes at a local high school.

So, the leaders of the Occupy Wall Street “general assembly” — a sort of self-appointed protester executive body — decreed that drumming shall be limited to two hours a day. The general assembly has also imposed a 50% tax on the donations that drummers earn from passersby.

[np-related]

“They’re imposing a structure on the natural flow of music,” complained one drumming protester. “We’re like, ‘What’s going on here?’ They’re like the banks we’re protesting,” said another.

And that’s not all. The general assembly is also ordering protesters to clean up their camp sites in advance of a local community board inspection. In some cases, they’re taking down tents and sending people away, so that new protesters can set up shop. Fist-fights have ensued. But Lauren Digion, a leader of Occupy Wall Street’s “sanitation working group” isn’t phased. “Someone needs to give orders” she told Klein, after barking commands about who could use the communal sleeping bags and who couldn’t. “There’s no sense of order in this f–king place.”

And that’s anarchism in a nutshell for you. It’s all drum circles and “natural flow” and “consensus” — until the time comes to actually get something done; at which point the self-appointed dictators start emerging naturally from amidst the protesters, like mushrooms after a week of rainstorms. For strong personalities, the hyper-egalitarian mantras of anarchism act as a smokescreen for authoritarianism.

Kropotkin’s contemporaries pounded more than drums: Within the space of the two decades between 1893 and 1913, European anarchists managed to kill a president, two prime ministers and two kings. But in our own less violent era, the most famous anarchist is Julian Assange (although he’s never used that term to describe himself), whose WikiLeaks organization has been publishing secret government documents since 2007. Assange has declared that his goal is to cripple U.S. power by destroying the ability of government officials to exchange secure communications. At the Occupy Wall Street protests, a panel truck painted up as a “WikiLeaks Mobile Information Collection Unit” has had a conspicuous presence.

But Assange’s influence may be waning. This week, he declared that he doesn’t have the money to continue WikiLeaks’ publication operations — a state of affairs he blames on the “blockade” imposed by leading financial companies such as Visa and PayPal. He complains that “the blockade is outside of any accountable public process. It is without democratic oversight or transparency.” It turns out that national governments are not quite so obsolete as he imagined.

Because he poked Washington in the eye so often and so hard, Assange has become a hero to many on the left. France’s Le Monde newspaper named him man of the year. On Time magazine’s list, he was runner-up to Mark Zuckerberg. He’s been cast as a sort of digital Robin Hood, leading a band of plucky hackers who skip merrily around from country to country, publicizing diplomatic cables and other secret documents as they go.

The truth about WikiLeaks — detailed in a tell-all book published earlier this year by Assange’s former deputy, Daniel Domscheit-Berg — is very different.

“What connected Julian and me was the belief in a better world,” Domscheit-Berg writes in Inside WikiLeaks. “There would be no more bosses or hierarchies, and no one would achieve power by withholding from the others the knowledge needed to act as an equal player.”

But by the time the two parted ways in 2010, Domscheit-Berg reports, the group seemed to resemble “a kind of religious cult” around Assange: “The guru was beyond questioning.”

Read the rest here.

A friend of mine who is a syndicated columnist in the United States recently published a column ticking off all of Iran’s various outrages — including throwing three innocent hikers into prison. That attracted this email from a conspiracy theorist who shall remain nameless — suggesting that the hikers were actually some kind of nuclear spies. The “connect the dots” logic is, of course, usual fare for conspiracists. But I have to admit that this is the first time I’ve seen anyone try to suggest that the hikers were spooks.

William Randolph Hearst has been dead for 60 years.  But yellow journalism survives. Iran is a emerging country that we have built a wall around.  We did the same to Cuba.  So much for repeating a mistake and expecting Iran (or Cuba) to be our friend.

The latest outrage against Iran was the three American hikers.  They read from prepared statements at their news conference, took no questions, and haven’t been heard from since.  The $1.5 million bail money came from undisclosed sources.  Two of the hikers were previously living in that garden spot Syria.  All three hikers were UC Berkeley graduates.  A few freeway miles away are the Lawrence Livermore Labs—a major contractor for the CIA.  Even a second grader can connect these dots.

But on to our latest CIA snafu.  The $100,00 just happened to end up in an FBI-controlled bank account.  The Mexican cartel member just happened to be a U.S. paid informant.  Mexican drug gangs kill with guns and knives—suddenly they’re explosion experts?  The Iranian-born American citizen intermediary who spilled the beans is a used car salesman!  Once again the main actor in a tightly-controlled and monitored terror plot is a loud-mouth dolt.

In 1993 a World Trade Center plotter attempted to retrieve the van rental deposit.  Clumsy it was not. This had everything to do with understanding Middle Eastern culture.  On which the CIA remains clueless.

Three lawyers and their client who claim that Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and other Bush administration officials orchestrated the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks piled one mistake on top of another on their way to being sanctioned by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.

Attorneys William W. Veale, Mustapha Ndanusa and Dennis Cunningham were hit Friday by the circuit with $15,000 in sanctions for filing a frivolous appeal and then doubling down by claiming the three circuit judges should recuse themselves from a motion to rehear because they were guilty of “rank, dishonest wielding of power.”

The sanctions fight began in April, when Judges Ralph K. Winter, John M. Walker Jr. and Jose Cabranes issued an order to show cause why army specialist April Gallop and her counsel of record should not be sanctioned for filing a frivolous appeal following the 2010 dismissal of her case against Mr. Cheney and others by Judge Denny Chin (NYLJ, April 28).

Before Ms. Gallop responded to the order to show cause, she moved on June 16 to disqualify the panel from considering her petition for rehearing in banc. The motion, signed by Mr. Veale, of Walnut Creek, Calif., accused the judges of “evident severe bias, based in active personal emotions arising from the 9/11 attack…leading to a categorical pre-judgment totally rejecting [Gallop's] complaint, out of hand and with palpable animus in [its] decision.”

He also sought the recusal of “any other members of the bench of this circuit who share their feelings” from considering Ms. Gallop’s petition.

That did not sit well with the judges …

Read the rest here, at the web site of The New York Law Journal.

The appellate court decision in the case described, Gallop v. Cheney, can be read here.

“They have more people in the CIA, the FBI. They have an employment office for Mormons in D.C. to be able to infiltrate them into the government … They’ve been trying since the beginning to get someone in the presidency, because they believe they have to establish their authority so when Jesus comes to Earth, the Mormon Church will take control of the government and the Mormon will be the government of God on Earth.”

Read the rest here.

… Despite the fact that, as WND’s own report admits, the Centers for Disease Control concludes “there was no unusual pattern or clustering to the deaths that would suggest that they were caused by the vaccine.”

p.s. Note the headline on the article, cleverly picked to summon to mind the image of exploding heads.

… from xkcd

I’ve written in the past about right-wing conspiracy theorists’ obsession with George Soros. But this week brought an interesting twist: The right-wing Birther/Evangelical conspiracy site WorldNetDaily has an article entitled “Why U.S. military in Uganda? George Soros’ fingerprints all over it.” It starts as follows:

After President Barack Obama announced earlier this week that he would be sending American troops into Uganda, WND uncovered billionaire activist George Soros’ ties both to the political pressure behind the decision and to the African nation’s fledgling oil industry. Soros sits on the executive board of an influential “crisis management organization” that recently recommended the U.S. deploy a special advisory military team to Uganda to help with operations and run an intelligence platform, a recommendation Obama’s action seems to fulfill.

The material that follows draws the usual sort of tenuous, six-degrees-of-separation links with Soros. But interestingly, it also implies the same war-for-oil logic that we heard from the anti-war left back when American tanks were rolling into Iraq eight years ago. Remember all the flowcharts purporting to show how that war was going to make Dick Cheney rich?

We still have those kind of flowcharts, of course. But now, they lead to George Soros — who might be best described in conspiracist mythology as “the left-wing Dick Cheney.”

Here’s a very interesting blog post by John Mearsheimer responding to Jeffrey Goldberg’s claim that Mearsheimer wrote a favourable blurb for a book by an author whom Goldberg alleges to have holocaust-revisionist tendencies. Mearsheimer says that this description of the author in question (Gilad Atzmon) is ludicrous, and he seems to make a strong case.

Yet the whole thing seems bizarre. Goldberg is a real journalistic titan — and his blog post appears on the highly respectable Atlantic web site. It seems odd that he would be as careless as Mearsheimer suggests about throwing around this type of radioactive accusation. (I also note that Jonathan Tobin of Commentary magazine has weighed in vociferously — on Goldberg’s side, calling Atzmon a flat-out “Holocaust denier.”)

Wouldn’t be surprised if this one ended up in the courts. These are not wild-eyed conspiracy theorists we’re talking about, but real intellectuals with reputations to protect.

This article by Daveed Gartenstein-Ross originally appeared on the Gunpower & Lead blog, and is reprinted with the author’s permission.

Last night a student journalist sent me an inquiry about Osama bin Laden’s death — inquiring whether I “really believe Osama Bin Laden is dead.” Blake Hounshell quipped, probably correctly, that I “should have just written, ‘Yes.’” But, being me, that isn’t what I did. Instead I spent what was quite likely far too much time going through the data points that caused him to question bin Laden’s death, and explaining why I thought he was misreading the relevant information. I am posting an only slightly cleaned-up version of my e-mail below (but keeping the journalist’s identity secret) because I think it illustrates a few relevant points concerning conspiracy theories within my field.

The first thing it illustrates is how much time it takes to debunk rather baseless conspiracy theories. The e-mail sent to me basically strung together a number of disparate data points that didn’t amount to much — but going through and actually explaining why I disagreed with his reading of each of these points was a rather time-consuming task.

The second relevant thing this exchange illustrates is one of the harms of baseless conspiracy theories: actually debunking them requires a great deal of time that could be better spent on more productive matters. And this is one reason that a lot of intelligent people tend not to spend their time refuting conspiracy theories: it requires time and mental energy that could be more productively used. Unfortunately, the fact that intelligent people don’t spend their time debunking these matters is one thing that helps them to fester. There is also another, more sinister, reason that intelligent people sometimes steer clear of debating conspiracy theories: the proponents of these theories can recklessly hurl accusations, potentially endangering your work, or your life. Read this entry concerning Andrew Exum’s experience with a German conspiracy theorist that illustrates the point.

And note that when one starts with the position that they want to believe in a grand conspiracy, decisively refuting it can be near impossible. The below e-mail demonstrates that my interlocutor misinterpreted or misunderstood every data point that caused him to question whether bin Laden is dead — but at the end of the day, what I have written doesn’t prove that bin Laden is in fact dead. Someone committed to believing in a conspiracy can easily, proceeding from a baseline of radical skepticism, simply shift the basis for his skepticism and impose new burdens of proof.

Both the left and the right have their own conspiracy theories. There are of course some actual conspiracies in this world, so I wouldn’t argue that they are never correct. Rather, I’d simply counsel that if you find yourself being persuaded by a conspiracy theory, do some serious due diligence at the front end to make sure that you won’t simply end up wasting various people’s time on it — including your own.

My third and final point concerns collegiality, a topic that garnered some attention when Andrew Exum and I discussed it in a Q&A I did for his Abu Muqawama blog. When Exum asked me about the collegiality I tend to display in my exchanges on Twitter and elsewhere, I explained that among other things there is a strategic reason for this. “I find that if I’m civil, I can actually (sometimes) persuade people I’m arguing against that they’re wrong about an issue. In contrast, if I begin a debate by insulting someone, it only further entrenches him in his initial position, thus making it more difficult to talk sense into him,” I noted. Now, I have no idea if I will persuade this journalist that this idea for a non-story isn’t worth writing about, or that his conspiratorial view of bin Laden’s death is wrong. But I do know that if I have any chance of persuading him on this point, it is by assuming his good faith when answering his questions, and addressing them directly, rather than belittling him. Moreover, I think this exchange underscores one other point I made in my discussion with Exum: being polite does not mean holding back in your arguments.

What follows is my e-mail to the journalist, slightly edited for publication. Continue reading →

“’9/11 conspiracy theories ridiculous’ says al-Qaeda” — The Onion, April, 2008

Hilarious! Could exist only in satire, right?

Wrong. Three years later, we have this …

“The Iranian government has professed on the tongue of its president Ahmadinejad that it does not believe that al-Qaida was behind 9/11 but rather, the US government … Why would Iran ascribe to such a ridiculous belief that stands in the face of all logic and evidence?” — Al-Qaeda’s Insight Magazine, Sept., 2011

George Soros is old. He is rich. He is left-wing. And he gives away his money — a lot of it — to a lot of different left-wing groups in a lot of different parts of the world. Put together all of these factors and you can create a sort of endless playground for Glenn Beck and other Soros conspiracists: No matter where you are on earth, or what phenomenon you are seeking to explain, it is never hard to somehow trace the blame to Soros.

Consider this gem from WorldNetDaily:

The Usual Suspects: Soros fingerprints all over protests here, too

– Sordid ties of architect who specializes in crisis –

By Aaron Klein

The Democrat strategist identified as an architect of the social protests currently rocking Israel previously ran the campaign of Bolivia’s former president, who was ushered into office amid escalating social protests in that country. After Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada took power in Bolivia in 1985, he quickly implemented an economic “shock therapy” crafted by Jeffrey Sachs, a Columbia University professor who sits on the board of an organization literally seeking to reorganize the entire global economic system. That group is the Institute for New Economic Thinking, or INET.Philanthropist George Soros is INET’s founding sponsor, with the billionaire having provided a reported $25 million over five years to support INET activities.  Last weekend saw the largest protests in Israel’s history. Four hundred thousand people hit the streets in cities across the country purportedly to protest against the rising cost of living while demanding sweeping economic reforms …

To recap: The left-wing social protests that are disrupting Israel were organized, in part, by person A, who previously was involved in a similar event in country B (Bolivia) many years ago, which helped usher in President C (Sànchez), who was influenced by Economist D (Sachs), who sits on the board of Group E (INET), which was funded by … Soros!

And to think that Soros thought that he was going to get away with this diabolical scheme.

Medved’s various references to Joseph Farah and “World Nut Daily” spawned this rebuttal on WND …

On Sept. 11, 2011, the Pacifica Radio Network asked me to conduct a debate on the subject of 9/11 with several conspiracy theorists, Ted Fletcher and Kevin Ryan. Here is the 3-minute opening statement I was asked to deliver, defending the official theory of 9/11:

I am here to defend the official theory of 9/11 — which is that the 9/11 attacks and the damage they caused were the work of al-Qaeda terrorists who hijacked commercial airliners and smashed them into the Twin Towers and Pentagon.

In doing so, I will emphasize the conclusions of others — namely the 9/11 commission report, the detailed reports from the National Institute of Standards and Technology, and journalistic investigations too numerous to mention.

All of these reputable sources, which collectively drew on the work of thousands of scientists and engineers in government, academia and private practice, support the official view of 9/11.

In particular, they support the view that the destruction of the Twin Towers — which is the main obsession of many conspiracy theorists — was caused by the crash of airliners into the upper floors, the ignition of dozens of tons of airplane fuel, the weakening of load-bearing steel columns due to fires, the deformation of critical floor trusses, and the consequent catastrophic collapse of the structures.

Members of the 9/11 Truth Movement, as it is called, say they are open-minded skeptics who are simply asking questions.

But in the years I spent writing my recently published book about 9/11 conspiracy theories, I found that almost all of these activists have already made up their mind.

In particular, they believe that World Trade Center buildings 1, 2, and 7 were brought down through controlled internal demolition — and that the masterminds of this plot were elements within the Bush administration seeking a pretext to attack Iraq and Afghanistan.

This conspiracy theory has been debunked many times over during the last decade.

But 9/11 Truthers still cling to their various talking points, which generally consist of misleading scientific factoids, and stray quotations from public figures and eyewitnesses presented out of context.

And I imagine that during this debate, we will set about discussing some of these details.

But one does not have to debate these fine points to understand how far-fetched the conspiracy theorists’ views truly are.

All one has to do is ask the following question

Do you truly think it possible that a secret army consisting of thousands of spies and demolitions engineers could really spend months planting thousands of bombs around some of the busiest office buildings in the world without someone noticing?

And even if they were successful in this Hollywood-style plot, do you imagine that no one from this army of thousands of evil-doers would come forward to tell the truth, despite the passage of a decade?

Conspiracy theorists claim the mainstream media won’t tell the truth about 9/11 because we are on orders not to from our corporate puppet-masters.

But in fact, just about every journalist I know — including me — would love nothing more than to become rich and famous by unmasking a conspiracy that, if true, would be the story of the century.

But in fact, these conspiracy theories are not true.

And I thank the organizers for giving me the chance to explain why.

By Maurizio Cocco

Today’s financial crisis has hit Italy hard. And it looks like Italians are looking for conspiracist explanations to explain their  problems.

For the last 150 years (Italy’s unification was accomplished in 1861) it’s been very Italian to blame anything on the government. There’s even a wonderful old adage: piove, governo ladro (“it rains, thievish government!”). We must also not forget that it was a crucial part of fascist propaganda to present Italy as champion of the free world against the foreign plutocracies.

There are some recent signs of an uptick in this conspiracist subculture in Italy — from the airing of conspiracism-related TV shows to the use of conspiracy theories by politicians.

The Italian state-owned public service broadcaster, Rai, has aired since 2003 a TV show named Voyager, which profiles mysteries and conspiracy theories. A brief, off-the-top-of-my-head list of themes discussed in the show includes: moon-landing conspiracy theories, Templars, chemtrails, planet Nibiru and so on. The show host, Roberto Giacobbo, has also written numerous books on this theme, including one about the 2012 end-of-the-world theory.

Since the summer of 2009, Mediaset (the media company owned by Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi) has started airing, in prime time, a conspiracist show named Mistero (Mystery). Just last week, an episode of Mistero suggested that Anders Breivik was a puppet in the hands of the New World Order.    Continue reading →

The latest issue of The Canadian Charger (which specializes in bashing Israel, 9/11 conspiracy theories, and spreading panic about the alleged health risks associated with wi-fi computer networks) informs us that “Ezra Levant is a Zionist who believes that every Jew has a birthright to settle in Israel; an apartheid state created for Jews only at the expense of native Palestinians. To serve his ideology, Levant regularly smears Islam and Muslims.”

It’s not the first time that Ezra’s been accused of all that. Frankly, I was more interested to see that the Charger got its caricature artist to produce a pretty good image of the notorious Zionist (see above for a small thumbnail. See here for the real thing). The same artist did a good job on me back in 2010 (see above, and here).

Mine was even more impressive, actually, since — unlike the more distinctive-looking Ezra — I am a generic looking brown-haired white middle-aged male. Yet the guy really nailed me in a recognizable way anyhow.

p.s. I tracked the artist down: He’s an Egyptian-Canadian artist who goes by the pen name of Hatem. Check out his portfolio — he’s very talented.

RFE/RL’s James Kirchick interviewed me about “the persistence of conspiracy theories.”

The show can be heard here. The text of the interview appears here and below.

Conspiracy theories have existed since the beginning of time, but they have found a newfound prominence in the last decade as a result of the terrorist attacks of 9/11.  In the words of journalist Jonathan Kay, conspiracies are more than just fun and games, but “threaten to turn the country into a sort of intellectual Yugoslavia – a patchwork of agitated cults screaming at one another in mutually unintelligible tongues. It’s a trend that every thinking person has a duty to fight.” Kay, a managing editor for Canada’s National Post, is the author of a new book, “Among the Truthers: A Journey Through America’s Growing Conspiracist Underground.” I recently interviewed him for “The Blender,” RFE/RL’s weekly podcast, about the variety of theories, Donald Trump, and whether promoters of conspiracies are just in it for the money. The full transcript of our interview is below.

RFE/RL: Can you tell us now, this is the 10th anniversary of 9/11, would you say that 9/11 conspiracy theories are more or less prevalent than in the initial aftermath of the attacks?

Jonathan Kay: It’s an interesting question. 9/11 conspiracy theories didn’t really peak until late 2003 and early 2004 and the reason for that is the Iraq War. A lot of people felt deceived that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and they started asking themselves, “what else have we been misled about?” And this led to a natural increase in 9/11 conspiracy theories and so 2004, 2005, 2006 there was a lot of conspiracism. The election of Barack Obama in 2008, I’d say marked the point where the conspiracy theories started to turn downward. Every conspiracy theory needs a good villain; it’s like a Hollywood movie. And you had Bush and Cheney and Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld in the White House, they were kind of natural villain figures for conspiracy theorists. Obama didn’t fit the mold as well and since 2009 you’ve seen, I’d say, a downward trend in 9/11 conspiracy theories. At the same time, conspiracy theorists have shifted to other conspiracy theories like conspiracy theories about the Federal Reserve and so forth and of course you have “Birther” conspiracy theories about Barack Obama’s birthplace. Continue reading →

“There’s a woman who came up crying to me tonight after the debate. She said her daughter was given that [HPV] vaccine. She told me her daughter suffered mental retardation as a result of that vaccine.”

From (who else?) WorldNetDaily:

Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio in Arizona has constituted a special law enforcement posse to investigate allegations brought by members of the Surprise, Ariz., Tea Party that the birth certificate Barack Obama released to the public April 27 might be a forgery, WND has learned. The posse, under the authority of Arpaio’s office, will consist of two former law enforcement officers and two retired attorneys, headed by Michael Zullo, a retired police detective originally from Bergen County, N.J. WND confirmed with Zullo and with Arpaio’s office that the investigation into the Obama birth certificate has been sanctioned fully by Arpaio’s office. The investigation, they said, will be conducted with “utmost diligence,” and the investigators will be authorized to utilize subpoena power.

Read the rest here.

Remember “Climategate?” That was the apparent scandal that began in 2009 when hackers downloaded and publicized thousands of emails from the Climate Research Unit of the University of East Anglia. Climate-change skeptics claimed that the emails showed that scientists were engaged in a massive conspiracy to suppress the “truth” that man-made warming was a giant hoax perpetrated by Al Gore, George Soros, the United Nations, and the Sierra Club.

As it turned out, there was no scandal. Six separate investigations into”climategate” all showed that the supposed damning evidence was just cherry-picked, decontextualized sound bites from candid discussions among scientists. As Scientific American magazine reported: “Nothing in the stolen material undermines the scientific consensus that climate change is happening and that humans are to blame.” (In any event, as any thinking person already knew, the East Anglia data set was just one of several showing the massive warming pattern on earth.) Continue reading →

If the Birthers are consistent, they really should demand to see Glen Rice’s birth certificate.

My latest National Post column — about the fake-anti-semitism story at York U. Here’s an excerpt …

I found it interesting how quickly the story made the rounds of the internet. Within the space of a few hours on Monday night, five different middle-aged or senior-citizen Jewish correspondents sent me variations on this story. “York U [prof] makes anti-Semetic remark. Verifiable,” read one subject line. Another woman asked: “Do we think he’d say ‘All Muslims are terrorists,’ or ‘All blacks should be slaves’?” With every cycle of mass email forwarding, the story was getting more sensational.

This is part of a trend. When I started this job in 1998, most of the bogus stories I got by email were from younger correspondents — because there just weren’t that many older people online. But then two things happened.

First, young web surfers taught themselves how to check facts, by using Wikipedia and Snopes and other reputable sites. To avoid making reply-all fools of themselves, they stopped mass-forwarding bogus stories of the York U variety.

Second, when those young adults started going off to college, or moving away — their parents had to figure out email and Facebook and Webcams in order to communicate with their kids and view pictures of their grandchildren. But these 50-, 60-, and 70-year old Internauts, having grown up in the age of print, never figured out that most of what you read online is made up. So when their sister-in-law’s hairdresser sends them something shocking, they uncriticially pass it on to their friends.

This explains why many middle-aged people and senior citizens I meet are actually more misinformed and radicalized than their children. Many Tea Party fanatics, in particular, are older white people who have cobbled a political philosophy together from nonsense Internet stories claiming that Barack Obama is Muslim, that global warming has been “debunked” or that universal health care means sending grandma to a “death panel.”

Canada’s Jewish community, I’ve found, is particularly vulnerable to this phenomenon. Thanks to the dense electronic civil society that binds together Jewish study groups, synagogue congregations and pro-Israel NGOs — call it “Bubbie-and-Zayde-Net” — any story involving anti-Semitism tends to spread like wildfire. A few months ago, for instance, a rumour started that Delta Airlines was going to exclude Jews from its flights because of its commercial relationship with a Saudi airline. The story was completely bogus, but dozens of people sent it to me anyway. To this day, variations on it still land in my inbox.

Read the rest here.

Listen here.

This week, Toronto hosted a conference of 9/11 skeptics. Most, but not all, of them believe that the CIA was secretly responsible for the attacks. They are part of an incredible movement of people who just don’t buy the official version of what happened 10 years ago. These are people Jonathan Kay knows very well. He’s the managing editor for Comment at the National Post and the author of Among the Truthers: A Journey into the Growing Conspiracist Underground of 9/11 Truthers, Birthers, Armageddonites, Vaccine Hysterics, Hollywood Know-Nothings and Internet Addicts. Jonathan Kay was in our Toronto studio …

Readers of Among The Truthers will know that it was not intended as a debunking resource for 9/11 conspiracy theories. Still, I did prepare a short appendix to allow readers to refute the most common arguments offered by conspiracy theories. That appendix never appeared in the print edition. So here it is now …

NORAD

The idea that North American Air Defense Command was somehow made to “stand down” on the morning of 9/11 is the Truthers’ most commonly parroted talking point. It’s a myth.

Members of the 9/11 Commission report made NORAD a central focus during their investigation. What they found was that the organization’s sluggish response to 9/11 was caused by Dr. Strangelove-era thinking: The organization’s leaders still imagined that the primary airborne threat to North America would come in the form of missiles and fighter aircraft — and that hijacked airplanes threatening the country would come from overseas, not America’s own airports. As 9/11 Commission senior counsel John Farmer wrote in his scathing 2009 book, The Ground Truth: The Untold Story of American Under Attack on 9/11, on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, U.S. air-defense doctrine was four decades out of date.

On 9/11, NORAD had only a small handful of jets available to chase down rogue airliners over domestic airspace, and no systematic way of tracking them if their transponder was deactivated by hijackers (as was the case with all four 9/11 airliners). The Hollywood-inspired notion that NORAD was capable of tracking and intercepting any airplane within a matter of minutes is wrong. Even United Airlines Flight 93, the last plane to be hijacked, likely would have reached its Washington, D.C. target if passngers hadn’t stormed the cockpit: At the time it crashed, NORAD’s Northeast Air Defense Sector hadn’t even been informed that it had been hijacked (let alone dispatched juets to shoot it down).

Those who entertain doubts in this area should read Michael Bronner’s outstanding article about NORAD’s 9/11 response in the August 2006 issue of Vanity Fair (available[1] on the internet at the time of this writing). The web version of the article is particularly helpful, since it includes links to MP3 files containing key conversations between NORAD officials on Sept. 11, 2001. As Bronner’s research shows, dozens of different officials and facilities were involved in NORAD’s 9/11 operations, with various field officers haphazardly leapfrogging the normal chain of command in a desperate bid to thwart the hijackers. Not a single one of them betray any hint that they were “standing down” NORAD’s military assets. Continue reading →

“Conspiracy theorists are, in a word, bores. A book about them can’t help but be a bit boring, too.“

I have a new article up on the Canadian news site The Mark explaining the significance of this week’s 9/11 conspiracist conference in Toronto — and why the whole movement is on the downswing. Here are the reasons I give

1. The primary motivation for many Truthers was the war in Iraq (which is why the Truth movement did not peak until between 2004 and 2006, several years after the 9/11 attacks). Many anti-war critics saw that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and then asked themselves, “What else was the U.S. government lying about?” Now that the Iraq war is in denouement and out of the headlines, the impulse toward 9/11 conspiracism has been reduced.
2. The great villains of the 9/11 Truth movement were the “neocons” in the Bush administration. Once those neocons left office, 9/11 conspiracy theories were like Hollywood action films without villains. Some Truthers transferred their suspicion to the new president, Barack Obama, and the people around him, claiming that the Democrats were covering up for the crimes committed by the Republicans. But it was a dubious jump – even for conspiracy theorists.
3. For millions of North Americans, the 2008 financial crisis and the resulting recession have now superseded the 9/11 attacks as the defining trauma of our era. Thus, new conspiracy theories tend to focus on financial themes (especially the Federal Reserve) rather than military and geopolitical themes. I have also observed a transfer of conspiracist attention to crank health scares, such as those involving WiFi computer networks.

9/11 conspiracy theories won’t disappear entirely. Rather, they will sink into the subterranean edifice of paranoia on which future conspiracy theories build their new fantasies – much in the way that many 9/11 Truthers based their own attitudes on conspiracy theories from the JFK era and the Cold War.

Read the rest of the article here.

Here’s Zerb’s latest — in which she seizes on an upcoming Toronto 9/11 Truth conference to recite the tired litany of conspiracist talking points about Building 7 and the like. (She wrote exactly the same kind of “news” piece seven years ago.)

I know this is just the Toronto Star. Still, it’s rare that you see a (technically) broadsheet newspaper give credence to Truther claims.

… But he’s no 9/11 conspiracy theorist, as we learn in a great article in The First Post:

Take the plane that struck the Pentagon. Many conspiracists say it wasn’t a plane but a missile. Eye-witnesses of a large plane hitting the Pentagon are contemptuously brushed aside. There are some photos of the impact of the “object” – i.e. the Boeing 757, flight 77 – which seem to show the sort of hole a missile might make. Ergo, the Pentagon wasn’t hit by a 757 but by a missile.

And yet images exist of the 757 plane hitting the Pentagon, taken by the surveillance cameras at Pentagon’s heliport, which was right next to the impact point. Chuck Spinney, now retired after years of brilliant government service exposing the Pentagon’s budgetary outrages, tells me: “I have seen them both – stills and moving pictures. I just missed seeing it [the moment of impact] personally, but the driver of the van I just got out of in South Parking saw it so closely that he could see the terrified faces of passengers in the windows. I knew two people who were on the plane. One was ID’d by dental remains found in the Pentagon.”

This won’t faze the conspiracists. They’re immune to any reality check. Spinney “worked for the government”. They switched the dental records. The Boeing 757 was flown to Nebraska for a rendezvous with President Bush, who shot the passengers, burned the bodies on the tarmac and gave Spinney’s friend’s teeth to Dick Cheney to drop through a hole in his trousers amid the debris in the Pentagon.

Read the whole thing here.

Senior Diplomat Asks for Identification of Main Culprits behind 9/11 Attacks

TEHRAN (FNA)- A senior Iranian Foreign Ministry official and a career diplomat, Mohsen Pakaein, blames the American Neoconservatives for the September 11 attacks on the US, saying that Neocons have victimized thousands of Americans in a bid to attain an array of large-scale goals, including finding control over the world nations and their wealth.

The full report can be found here. One interesting thing to note is how closely Pakaein’s conspiracist arguments hew to the nonsense about steel melting temperatures and Pentagon debris you hear from American or European 9.11 conspiracy theorists. Globalization is very much on display in the field of conspiracism: Just as a McDonalds hamburger tastes the same all around the world, so do Truthers recite precisely the same talking points whether in English, Spanish, Arabic or Farsi.

In Western nations, 9/11 conspiracy theories are widespread, but they are still “dissident narratives” that are largely discredited or ignored by mainstream media, political organization and civil-society groups . Not so, in Muslim nations, as Eric Trager reports:

In a report on Muslim-Western relations released on July 21 of this year, the Pew Research Center asked Muslim respondents in eight countries—including Lebanon, Jordan, Egypt, Turkey, and Pakistan—whether they thought groups of Arabs carried out the 9/11 attacks on the United States. In every country, less than 30 percent of respondents professed their belief for the idea, and in Jordan, Egypt, and Turkey the level of acceptance is lower today than it was in 2006. Indeed, the same revolutionary Arab Street that toppled Mubarak in Egypt also registered the highest level of denial among all the countries surveyed, with a full 75 percent of respondents recording their disbelief. Pew’s poll numbers from Egypt track closely with my own experience in the country, where I lived and conducted doctoral research during parts of its tumultuous spring. Perhaps unsurprisingly, I found that 9/ll revisionism was particularly prominent among Islamists, for whom rewriting history is necessary for deflecting the accusation that their ideology motivates mass murder. “There is no Al Qaeda,” former Muslim Brotherhood Supreme Guide Mehdi Akef told me in complete seriousness. “It’s an American expression. It’s just an ideology, Al Qaeda. This ideology comes from America and their coalitions.” In Akef’s inversion of reality, 9/11 constituted an American attack on the Middle East, followed by an Islamist policy of self-defense. “When they fight in Iraq and Afghanistan, Al Qaeda thinks it’s a jihad because the fight is against occupation,” he said. “And it is jihad to fight occupation. And when Americans kill civilians everywhere, it’s a big crime against humanity.”

Read the rest here.