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 42nd 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.
Fellow Ron Paul supporters on the Internet led me to the second important event, which was the time when I first watched “Loose Change-Second Edition.” The idea of the US government secretly orchestrating the attacks of 9/11 was one which I couldn’t believe, but one which in my mind seemed credible from the evidence that they were presenting. Jet fuel can’t burn at a temperature to melt steel? Ok. The hole in the Pentagon, as well as the lack of debris, puts into serious doubt whether it’s a missile? Sure. World Trade Centre 7 seemed to implode at freefall speed in its own footprint? This all seemed to me very logical, and based on my Grade 10 science education; this seemed to make a lot of sense.
But in the world of Internet conspiracies, once you accept one, you accept more and more. It becomes a gateway path to accept other often broader and (ultimately) crazier conspiracy theories, because once you accept the lack of trust in the government on one issue, you start to think “well, if they did it here, why can’t they do it anywhere else.” If the Bush Administration orchestrated the 9/11 attacks, for example, what morally prevents them from wanting to set up FEMA camps, or insert us with microchips, or even set up a one world oligarchic totalitarian state ruled by the elites who attend the Bilderberg Conferences?
Hence by 16 I was a regular listener of shows ranging from Freedom Watch with Andrew Napolitano to Infowars with Alex Jones. Some of my favourite documentary films, like many conspiracy theorists, were Aaron Russo’s America: Freedom to Fascism, Peter Joseph’s Zeitgeist, and Alex Jones’ Endgame, which I watched over and over again. I particularly think back to a scene in Endgame where Alex Jones yells into a megaphone addressing the attendants of the Bilderberg Convention from behind a fence as his supporters cheered. I became emotionally stirred, and viewed Alex Jones as a Che Guevara type figure who was leading a revolution against oppressive globalist politicians and major corporations.
I also regularly discussed in conspiracy chat rooms on Stickam, and engaged in dialogues with other users on YouTube, some with passion and vigour than with others. For most of the time as a conspiracy theorist, however, I kept it to the computer, although little parts of my conspiracy minded thinking came out amongst some of my friends and family. I remember having discussion with my parents and with someone who is today still one of my best friend’s about whether or not 9/11 was an inside job. Often these people couldn’t contradict my arguments, and by extension I went further down the rabbit hole, but what I should have realized then was that I should not have expected a peer or my own mother to have the information right on hand to be able to contradict my arguments, often because they cannot possibly be expected to know about and contradict the sort of esoteric information to come at them about minute details which are justly considered irrelevant by reasonable researchers. (Think Loose Change citing newspaper reports from within hours or days after the attacks, when the least information is known and when all sorts of allegations are thrown all over the place.)
However, even through all this constant exposure and fervour, I always kept one foot out of the rabbit hole, and was always reluctant to really take the plunge especially into the particularly delusional and grandiose conspiracy theories. I had regretfully refused an offer from the friend who introduced me to Robert Menard to be a sort of spokesman for the Free Man on the Land movement, which I explain later in this article, saying “I don’t even have full conviction that 9/11 was an inside job.” I had somewhat of a fixation with conspiracy theories, and even started to believe some of them, but there was always a trace of common sense within me, and there was inkling in my mind that this wasn’t right. It may have been their grandeur that appealed to me, but I also believe that there was a real sense of self-importance that they not only gave me, but also gave other truthers.
To believe in conspiracy theories means to believe in something which not held by the vast majority of people. This can be tremendously isolating but it also gives some people a sense of superiority, because they feel they have a truth that no one else has. You can usually tell the mindset of a person by the language is which they use. Alex Jones has been on camera comparing himself to Galileo, someone who holds an unpopular truth and is sent as an outcast by the rest of society. The jargon of conspiracy theorists is also revealing: words such as “sheeple” come right out of this mindset, as do the constant stock phrases used by conspiracy theorists such as “open your mind.”
I started to doubt these conspiracy theories by the time I was in the summer before Grade 11 and Grade 12, a few months before I turned 18. Some of these conspiracy theorists had gotten to the point of accusing Alex Jones himself of being a CIA agent. They assumed this because Alex Jones had appeared in Hollywood movies, such as A Scanner Darkly, and that Alex Jones rarely gave exposure to other, smaller conspiracy theorists. At this point, I really started to get sceptical of this movement. It began to occur to me that conspiracy theorists were utterly paranoid and filled in self-delusion, and the contradictions among many of them were endless. It seemed as if the list of people which were in on the conspiracy was absolutely endless, and it became too difficult to reasonably believe all of it.
Another important event which led me out of Internet conspiracy theories took place the first time I had mentioned Robert Menard to my father. Menard is head of a group known as “Free Man on the Land.” Menard had started this movement, which was eerily similar to the Montana Freemen who stood off with the US government in 1996. Menard claims that in the year 2000, a child of his which he fathered with a bar waitress and former cocaine addict, was taken away from him by child services. Out of an apparent translation he had done on his own of the notice which was given to him after the seizure, he found that by various different definitions of the law, he was able to find legal definitions which contradicted the reality in which the government had portrayed for its citizens. He claimed that to remedy this, he recommend forming “societies” one could separate from the government and form autonomous communities.
I was initially struck by his arguments and my father decided to check him out, particularly once I told him I was interested in interviewing him for a one-off Internet radio show I decided to air, as well as give him a little bit of money. I had always greatly respected my father, and when he explained with tremendous eloquence why he felt that Robert Menard was a bitter nutcase and I shouldn’t give him money, he made me pause, and by the end of an hour long discussion with my father decided to reconsider. This led me to further doubts on my former beliefs.
It was around this time which I started to take seriously the views of the “establishment” and the “sheeple.” It started from reading a book from The Canadian Taxpayers Federation published in 2002, which included a chapter on conspiracy theories regarding Canadian currency. The ease in which The Canadian Taxpayers Federation were able to make these ideas look like concoctions of a crazy person was dumbfounding. It was then I started to read criticism of other conspiracy theories from college professors and other notable intellectuals, and my conspiracy minded views started to slowly slip away, until by the second semester of Grade 12 I was arguing against one particular teacher who held conspiracy beliefs about 9/11.
I do not wish to sound as if this was my first time reading the materials from legitimate sources, but it was not until then that I realized how rich the world of legitimate scientists and intellectuals really was. The study of economics, politics, and history was so much more enriching, rigorous, and even ultimately truly sceptical than the half-baked ideas of Internet conspiracy theorists.
I had mostly done this work in isolation, although I can think of at least a few people with whom I’ve had some contact that I will likely avoid as a result of my relinquishing of conspiracy theories, not to mention those from the Ron Paul meet-up group. I had discussed seriously these sorts of fantasies under anonymous usernames online. Thankfully, most of my good friends in real life were not truthers of the sort, and most of the people I had met as a result of this phenomenon were on the Internet. I was not particularly close to any of these truthers online, and luckily did not have too much trouble in losing contact with them.
In fairness to conspiracy theorists, as I must be intellectually honest, my experience was not all bad. There were positive lessons I learned, as well as things I admittedly slightly miss. The conspiracy world was never dull. I sometimes miss the feeling that I have some greater truth, although doing actual learning does feel much greater. I was also indirectly introduced and became interested in the sorts of subjects that I currently study today as a result of being in the conspiracy world. I became interested in history, politics, and economics through my research in particularly covert American foreign policy and Austrian economics, and I study these subjects today at the University of Toronto. One thing that must be granted at least to the Internet conspiracy world is that it was not a cult of any kind. I had no price on my head when I left, and don’t even get hate mail, never mind death threats or other forms of particularly nasty abuse, although I was not a part of any major groups, never mind a spokesman for one.
Conspiracies themselves, but particularly my critical analysis of them, has also taught me in some sense the necessity of sceptical thinking. However, the contradiction, and by extension the problems, begins by first acknowledging that conspiracy theorists by definition base their thinking on the idea of scepticism. But this is a perversion, because they critically miss themselves as a target, and probably the most important target any sceptic should analyse.
I write this because I was an example of someone who did not fall down the rabbit hole, and the world of reality is more challenging, and more awesome than any constructed reality in the paranoid minds of conspiracy theorists. If you were doing the math at the beginning of this letter, I am now 20; still quite young, and still especially in need of much learning. But in my short life I think I’ve at least learned to some extent to distinguish between open-mindedness and delusion. This is the key to being able to begin all true learning, because if one cannot know what and who to believe, this leaves a person hopelessly gullible and, more dangerously, vulnerable.
Conspiracy theories, once fully embraced by their holder, are just as damaging to the human intellect as fundamentalist religion. It leaves its members just as closed minded, personally damaged, and in some case just as open to extremist action (think Joe Stack or Timothy McVeigh). This sort of thinking has done real damage in societies such as former Yugoslavia, where neighbouring, warring countries fell to ignorance and revisionism out of desperation and in an attempt to blame the other through accusations of elaborate plots. While the idea now seems very farfetched, I do not wish for our society to become in this sense like the former Yugoslavia. It is important for people in our society to not just merely attain facts but to develop sceptical thinking and moral backbones so that these types of beliefs will rejected and shunned.
