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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

A few years later, Lennon left New York in October of 1973 for Los Angeles, under the guise of a break up with wife Yoko Ono. In November, just a month later when “Mind Games” was released on the 16th, Alan Watts a Zen Buddhist and founder of the “Society for Contemplative Philosophy” died unexpectedly in his sleep aboard the SS Vallejo houseboat, moored in San Francisco Bay. Lennon’s song “Mind Games” was a shot across the bow of the British Foreign Office.

Was Alan Watts British intelligence? Was his end a result of “XPD” orders — meaning expedient demise — a term revealed by British author Len Deighton of “The IPCRESS File” fame?

Sadly for John Lennon, if the efforts of MI6 was to retaliate on December 8, 1980, their actions were indefensible. The admission of the FBI to cooperation with a “foreign government” as part of their battle to deny public access to the John Lennon FBI  files created greater suspicion of Britain’s Foreign Office in the entire affair. Repeated delays in the release of the FBI documents on the grounds of “Diplomatic, Economic, and Military Retaliation against the United States”, obviously signaled the severity of Lennon’s indiscretion and the absolute fear on behalf of the US government to interfere with the possibility of another British “revenge” mission.”

And on the 31st anniversary of John Lennon’s unprecedented and brutal murder, who should be invited by Her Majesty to attend the recent opening of the new Liverpool Museum, not Sir Paul or Ringo, but none other than Yoko Ono, who fearfully shook the Queen’s hand. Yoko remarked how young the Queen looked in her (Cardinal) red outfit. Yoko exclaimed “how the colour so suited her.”

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.

It is too early to tell which version of Soros’ reputation in the US will come to dominate the popular imagination. It is unlikely that Democrats will want to be closely associated with Soros, even if his financial and ideological support strengthens them.  Soros suffers from reluctance among reputational entrepreneurs in the United States to come to his defence – socialist or left-wing intellectuals may agree with much of his philanthropy but tend to be appalled by how he makes his money. Many ideological supporters of corporate oriented capitalism are uneasy with his statements about the need for government regulation. It is not yet clear how successful efforts will be to scapegoat Soros using the “paranoid style” of polemics that Richard Hofstadter argued has deep roots in American political culture. This view of Soros as a “Renegade Democrat,” however, has replaced the earlier image of the fighter for freedom under Communism in the Anglo-American world[iii].

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.

“This has all the appearances of a cover-up.” radio host Michael Savitch told WorldNetDaily. “They created their Reichstag fire, they found their Timothy McVeigh, they created their Jack Ruby. How could one man have blown up downtown Oslo and then raced to the island to kill those teenagers? This is likely a fabrication of the Norwegian labor party, which needs to hold on to power to enforce their multiculturalist Muslim favoring anti-nationalist views.”

That was the first conspiracy theory — that it was Muslims and multilateralists who were trying to discredit conservatives.

The second Norway conspiracy theory was that the attacks were actually part of a “New World Order” plot to create fear and anxiety in Europe, so that the “globalists” could ram a collectivist banking agenda down Europe’s throat. A fellow named Alex Jones took the lead on this one.  I’m not sure if people in this room know who Jones is. He has a popular radio show, and he is a particular hero among libertarians. Here is the way Jones reported the Norway shootings.

“They are now pulling out all the stops in an effort to crush resistance to endless bailouts, designed to crash local economies and destroy national sovereignty. It is no mistake the corporate media is comparing Anders Breivik to Timothy McVeigh. Hours after the terrorist attack Norway public broadcasters said the attack resembled the bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma, which as we all know, was a false-flag event used to roll out draconian aspects of the American police state in the 1990’s. Breivik is obviously just a patsy for those seeking to destroy political opposition to the world’s neo-liberal bankers.”

So, the first conspiracy theory is that it was Muslims and multi-culturalists. The second conspiracy theory is that it was the world’s bankers.

The third conspiracy theory was that Anders Breivik was actually a stooge of the Israelis, purportedly because Israel wanted to publish Norway’s pro-Palestinian politicians. The lead on this one was taken by a 9/11 conspiracy theorist by the name of Kevin Barrett, who lives in Wisconsin. He said: “Friday’s bloodbath in progressive Norway bears the markings of an Israeli moosad false flag terror attack. No Western country has supported the Palestinian cause more than the Norwegians.”

So, there you have it. Anders Breivik was a tool of the bankers, the Jews, or the Muslims. Take your pick.

Of course, we know all of this is nonsense, but its representative nonsense. It’s representative of the millions of conspiracy theories that you’re going to find on the Internet.  Because, first of all, what are conspiracy theories? They are theories of evil — evil such as the mass-murdering kind that Breivick epitomizes. Such theories answer the question: Why do bad things happen to good people? This is a question that used to be answered through religion. But for many people, we now live in a post-religious world. As a result, we have to make up new narratives that attempt to make sense of horrible things.

The second thing my three Norway examples show, and this is something I didn’t know going into the project, is that all conspiracy theories are essentially inter-changeable.

Originally, I thought I was going to have to spend 10 years researching my book, because there are so many conspiracy theories out there. Yet it turns out that conspiracy theories actually are remarkably similar. They all follow the same structure.  The structure is this: that there is evil in the world — terrorist attacks, depressions, wars — but that all of these evil acts are perpetrated by a small group of conspiring men (it is always men, not women) in a smoke filled room, somewhere in the world, trying to further some kind of evil agenda. What is interesting is that, for purposes of this narrative, the actual identity of the evildoer — Jew, Muslim, banker — is fairly inter-changeable.

In one chapter of my book, I talk about the Protocols of the Elders of Zion — a notorious anti-Semitic hoax published in the early part of the 20^th century alleging that the Jews of the world were conspiring to produce revolutions, wars, depressions, all manner of evil to further their sinister Jewish agenda.  What I found is that if you take the Protocols as your starting point, and then you replace the word “Jew” with the word “Muslim,” you actually wind up with something that closely resembles a lot of stuff that appears on militant right-wing websites today. Or you can replace the word “Jew” with “Bilderberger,” or “New World Order follower.” Or you can replace “Jew” with “Catholic,” and get a Dan Brown novel.

The point is that the structure of conspiracy theories is remarkably consistent. Which is why I urge the readers of my book to read the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Not because the Protocols are true, obviously, but because it is a blueprint for so much of the conspiracism and nonsense that we see on the Internet today. Ancient conspiracism helps us understand modern conspiracism.

When I started analyzing these conspiracy theories, I ended up reading a lot of manifestos that were very similar to the Protocols. But I also went out and actually started interviewing conspiracy theorists. Now, this seems like a fairly obvious thing to do when you are writing a book about conspiracy theories. But it turns out that not many authors have done it. Most books about conspiracy theories are either promoting conspiracy theories (which sell very well — the bookstores are full of them), or they’re books making fun of conspiracy theories, which is very easy to do, since many of these theories are ridiculous. But very few people have actually sat down with conspiracy theorists and asked them what they think.

When I sat down with these people, I had two questions for them. The first was: “What do you believe?” The second was: “When did you start believing it?”

If you ask a 9/11 conspiracy theorist, “What do you believe happened on 9/11?” they’ll start telling you that first Dick Cheney’s CIA minions put the bombs in the Twin Towers. Then his friends at NORAD shut down the entire flight defense system over North America. I’m a former engineer, a nerd, I like video games and sci-fi, and at first I was interested in this technical Tom Clancy type stuff. But, after a couple of months of hearing this sci-fi fantasy, I got bored of hearing the details. In fact, I realized I was hearing the same details over and over and over.

What was much more interesting was asking my interviewees the second question — *when* did they starting believing conspiracy theories.

As I said before, conspiracy theories are narratives about why bad things happen, about why evil exists in the world. But, they are also narratives of distrust.  The people who believe in conspiracy theories obviously don’t trust the government, or the media, or any public institutions. (When I told my interviewees I was an editor for the National Post in Canada, they just took it for granted that I am a professional liar who gets his marching orders every week from George Soros or the Zionists or whoever they imagine the ultimate paymaster is.) And so when you ask a conspiracy theorist “When did you start believing that 9/11 was an inside job?”, you’re asking them a very personal question. You are essentially asking them the question: “When did your world fall apart? When did you start believing that everybody was lying to you?” That is a very personal question, and I got some very interesting answers.

What I found was that different people had their own very different, very personalized points of entry into the world of conspiracy. But once they went down that rabbit hole, once the trust was broken, they became vulnerable to every conspiracy theory under the sun.  You very rarely run into someone who believes only one conspiracy theory.  Typically, what happens is that at first they’ll buy into one conspiracy theory, then they’ll get on the Internet, they’ll get on a few websites, they’ll start watching some videos, and before you know it, they believe dozens of conspiracy theories.

And when does this distrust start? Where is the point of entry?

For a lot of liberal 9/11 conspiracy theorists, it didn’t start right after 9/11, but rather in 2003 when they found out there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. The first question they asked is: What *else* is the government lying about? When you ask that question, the extrapolation of it can lead you into some very dark areas, and you start believing that the government is lying about *everything*, from what vaccines to take to whether cigarettes are bad for you, to whether there are UFOs in Colorado — to who destroyed the Twin Towers. After all, that was the event that ultimately led to the Iraq War, right?

One guy I interviewed for the book is a former NFL football player. He played defensive end for the New York Jets, and he’s now a successful investment banker in Toronto. He is Serbian by ancestry and he became radicalized during the Kosovo conflict in 1999. He started to believe, with some justification (there’s always a grain of truth behind these things) that NATO wasn’t telling us the full story about the Balkans. He believed there was a campaign of lies against Serbia. He told me that he thought that the videos showing the brutalization of Kosovar Albanians had been doctored in a studio.

Once that trust had been broken for this guy, he started to see everything through the same distrustful lens. So, two years after the Kosovo conflict, when 9/11 happened, he saw those terrible events through the same lens and became a 9/11 conspiracy theorist.

In some cases, the source of the distrust is something very personal. I interviewed some people whose children had autism and they had become convinced that their children’s condition was a result of vaccines that the children had taken, in particular the MMR vaccine. Believing that, they also came to believe that the pharmaceutical companies and the government, the FDA in particular, were lying to them about tests they had conducted on these vaccines. If the FDA was lying to them about the vaccines, and the government was lying to protect the FDA … what else was the government lying about? And from then on, they start believing all sorts of things.

No matter the reason that a person had been brought into the world of conspiracy, it was very difficult to bring them out again. It was very rare that you could get a conspiracy theorist to “recover.” Once their trust is broken with the powers that be, it is like a broken relationship — it is very hard to build the trust back.

One thing I confess in the last chapter of the book is that I’ve never won an argument with a conspiracy theorist. I spent three years working on the book, speaking with conspiracy theorists and never once was I able to convince any of these people that … you know, maybe it was al-Qaeda that did 9/11, or maybe Barack Obama was actually born in Hawaii. That’s because, for the people who adopt these theories, it becomes a worldview. It becomes like a form of religion. And like all religions, it becomes very precious to these people, because it is an explanation for evil. And, they hang on to it as a sort of security blanket to explain why bad things happen.

Unlike real religions, conspiracy theories do not supply gods, but they do supply something that might be even more important than gods for some people — they supply demons.  They supply a singular address for evil upon which you can blame everything.

And, in some cases, they provide literal demons. Many of the extreme Obama birthers you talk to actually do believe that Barack Obama is either the Anti-Christ, or the false prophet from the book of Revelation. So, the political conspiracy theory actually becomes a secularized version of the religious conspiracy theory that is embedded in the last book of the New Testament.

Because conspiracy theories are an explanation for evil, they always flourish in the aftermath of terrible, evil historical events. In the modern era, the first great conspiracy theories emerged in the aftermath of the French Revolution. We now look back at the French Revolution and focus on some of the positive ideological principles that came out of it. But at the time, of course, thousands of people were dying; you had blood running in the streets; you had “The Terror.” A lot of people became convinced that the French Revolution must have been a plot by the Jews, for instance. More than a century later, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion became popular in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution and WWI, when all of Europe was aflame. You also had conspiracy theories after JFK’s assassination, after 9/11, and after the 2008 financial crisis, as I explain in my book.

But conspiracy theories also have a political function — not just a psychological or quasi-spiritual function: For militant political movements, conspiracy theories act as a bridge between political ideology and reality.

Take Barack Obama Birthers, for instance. Let’s say you spent your entire political life believing that America is a right-wing country, and that it would never elect a left-wing Harvard type like Barack Obama — a community organizer from Chicago, no less. And then along comes the 2008 election, and this is exactly what America does — this shatters your view of the world. It is comforting to think that somehow that historical episode never happened, that it is illegitimate, that it is a hoax, that somehow if you do enough investigation, and if you count enough pixels on a PDF of Barack Obama’s electronic birth certificate, that you can somehow discover “the truth.” You can roll back presidential history in God’s eyes, and you can show the world that this episode never really happened. You can erase Obama’s presidency, and thereby bring the real world into compliance with the world that exists in your ideology.

This fetish for using conspiracy theories as a tool to change history — to make it align with some militant ideology or other — it exists on both sides of the political spectrum. Many 9/11 conspiracy theorists whom I interviewed, for instance, were left-wing ideologues. They had convinced themselves that America was the epicenter and font of all true evil in the world, and this became their mantra.  When 9/11 happened, and they were forced to see a truly despicable act of evil happen in their own backyard perpetrated by America’s *enemies*, it did not compute. There was this cognitive dissonance that arose between their ideology, which was anti-American, and the reality, which was that America’s enemies had perpetrated this epic signature act of evil. They were able to bring ideology and reality into a unified whole only by creating a theory that somehow this act of terrorism had been inflicted on America by its own leaders. So, it protects them from cognitive dissonance. It is a bridge between ideology and reality.

A common question I often get about the book: “Are there real conspiracies out there?” And the answer is: Of course. Iran-Contra, Watergate, Teapot Dome. In Canada, we had something called the Sponsorship Scandal, which no one here has heard of. It involved the Liberal Party and their fundraising irregularities. Real conspiracies do happen. They tend to be small, they tend to be grubby, and they tend to be about money or sex. They don’t tend to be about taking over the planet in the name of the Vatican, or the Bilderbergers. That’s the way you can tell a real conspiracy from a bogus conspiracy theory.

I was on the Diane Rehm show on NPR, and a lot of people who phoned in said: “You know, I lived through the JFK era. That conspiracy-theory stuff is nothing new. We had our own conspiracy theories back in the day. This is exactly what we went through 50 years ago.” And there is truth in that. But, there is a huge difference between then and now. And that difference, in a word, is the Internet.

Back in the era of JFK, if you were a conspiracy theorist and you wanted to get the word out about your far-out theory, it was hard. You couldn’t go to an editor of a mainstream newspaper or a magazine. Most would say, “Forget it, I’m not publishing your nonsense.” There were gatekeepers to the media. So, you went around wearing a sandwich board, or you called into radio stations, or you handed out leaflets on the street. You know, we make fun of these things, but if you’re a conspiracy theorist, this was the only option you had back then. You may have had community access television at 2AM in the morning. But otherwise, you really didn’t have many other options, because the media had real gatekeepers.

There is a difference now. Take me, I’m the editor of the op-ed page at the National Post (Canada’s Wall Street Journal, as I like to think of it). I walk around very puffed up. I’m a gatekeeper; I get to decide what opinions get disseminated in my pages. But these days, conspiracy theorists have no time for someone like me. The attitude is “Forget that guy, I’ll just put it on a blog! I’ll make a YouTube video. I’ll cut out the media middleman.” Thanks to this online technology, these folks can completely get around people like me, something that was impossible in the JFK era. That’s why, in my book, I argue that conspiracism has been transformed by the Internet as much as social media or pornography. 99.9% of conspiracism is now done on the Internet. They barely even have conferences anymore. What is the point when you can just create a website or a YouTube video?

And then there’s the rise of cheap digital video — something which obviously did not exist in 1963. How many people here have seen the 9/11 conspiracist film Loose Change? Often, I’m on college campuses and some guy in a 9/11 Truth T-shirt is giving it out for free. This is a really slick video purporting to explain why 9/11 was an inside job. The thing was made on a shoestring. All told, the ease of entry into the media market by conspiracy theorists has gone down by several orders of magnitude since the JFK era.

But the Internet has had another effect, which in some ways is more disturbing because it not only affects conspiracy theorists, it affects mainstream media consumers as well. That is the segmentation of media markets into silos.

Fifty years ago, it didn’t matter if you were a conspiracy theorist. In order to get the news, you had to either read the paper, listen to the radio, or watch TV. That was the only way you were going to get the news. It didn’t matter how crazy you were; chances are if you lived in New York, you read The New York Times, or some other major newspaper. There was no other way of getting the news. These days, the people I interviewed for this book, they don’t read the newspaper. Nor do they listen to the radio. (NPR? God forbid.) Nor do they watch TV. In some cases, they don’t even look at websites. Instead, when they wake up in the morning, right there in their inbox, they’d have 50 messages from various conspiracist pals from around the world giving them updates on news items they’ve been following. This is their news source.

This is a really scary thing. And, I see this all the time even among colleagues of mine in the mainstream media. They’ll tell me something and I’ll ask where they heard it and they’d say, “Oh, it’s all over my discussion group.” I would say, “Well, you should check that out, it sounds kind of bogus — like something I should put in my book.”

A lot of times, I’m finding that it is actually middle-aged people who are the most vulnerable to conspiracy theorists. It is a very interesting phenomenon. When I was in university, and I was surrounded by anarchists and Trotskyists and people clutching copies of Ayn Rand’s books, and Scientologists, I couldn’t wait until I grew up and met people who were more “normal.” Well, I grew up. And now FOX News has turned our Grandpas into raving conspiracy maniacs who think George Soros is taking over the world. (I went to Jon Stewart’s rally for sanity in Washington a while back, and they had all these hilarious signs, and the funniest said, “Glen Beck, stop scaring my Dad!”)

The reason for this, once again, has to do with the Internet. I notice there are a few young people in the crowd; and these people know how to use the Internet. If someone sends them a crackpot story, they search for it on Wikipedia, or on Snopes.com, or on some other quasi-reputable site where they can see if something is nonsense.  The people I interviewed who were 50, 60, 70, even 80, are different, though: They are hip enough to use the Internet, they’re just not hip enough to use it properly. So when their brother-in-law sends them a link to something about how Barack Obama isn’t a U.S. citizen, they just forward it to their whole address book. (I wrote an article entitled, “Who taught Bubba and Zadie how to use the Internet?” I got hate mail in Yiddish, which was a first for me.)

Then you get to a fundamental question: Does all of this hurt America? This is a question I often get. People say: “Oh, come on, these crackpots are having their fun on the Internet — who cares? This is just a hobby for these people. It’s harmless.”

And yes, for many people, it is just a hobby. I want to emphasize that I am not against the X-Files, I’m not against Thomas Pynchon, I’m not against Dan Brown (whose novels I’ve read, I’ll confess. I thought the movies was terrible but the book was fun). I’m not against conspiracy theories being used for entertainment. They are fun and they’re titillating. That is the main reason that radio producers decided to put me on their show to promote my book. People are interested in conspiracies.

However, when people make conspiracy theories their worldview, it becomes impossible to have any kind of public discourse. The example I give is: How are you supposed to have an intelligent argument or discussion with someone if that person thinks that ObamaCare is a secret plot to put Grandma before a death panel? What if Grandma herself thinks it’s a plot to put her before a death panel? Likewise, you can’t have a discussion about the legitimacy of Barack Obama’s presidency or his policies with someone who thinks he is an illegal alien. You can’t have a discussion about anti-terrorist policy or foreign affairs or security with someone who thinks that 9/11 was an inside job. It is just impossible. They live in different realities. You can’t span those realities with rationalism.

The question is: What can we do about this? Obviously, Hannah Arendt supplies inspiration because she shows that being a truth-teller is a noble thing. Even if the truth is difficult to accept, even if it might take a lot of time and attention to process, even if it may be boring at times, the truth is important. But I think we also have to accept the fact that the truth can be really difficult. That’s why people like Hannah Arendt are such heroes, telling the truth and accepting the truth when it is very difficult. Writing this book showed me how difficult the truth is for ordinary people. It is very easy for wealthy, well-educated people with brilliant children and grandchildren to accept the world as it is sometimes, because the world for these people is a very sunny place.

Many of the people I interviewed for the book weren’t in that place. They were confronting circumstances in their life; failed businesses, medical situations, which perhaps drove them into the arms of conspiracism. You have to appreciate that. For those people, it is really difficult to accept the truth. I confronted it right here in upstate New York. I flew in from Toronto last night. I went to go eat by myself at a pizza restaurant. I was the only guy in the place. I was sipping my coffee, and the waitress came to talk to me. This being America, and 2011, it took her about eight seconds to talk about how horrible Obama is. It was very sad. She told me she had a mother who was 52 with two degrees and can’t find a job. She herself was working for what I assume was a very low wage in a pizza restaurant. She has a three year old and very little hope for the future.  So it didn’t surprise me that she hated Obama and that she thought Obama was responsible for all of her problems.

Ten minutes later, she started talking about immigrants. She talked about a successful immigrant family that she knew who were running not one, but two restaurants now, and had three cars. She claimed, falsely I think, that they were receiving all kinds of government support because they were Mexican. What she was saying began to creep into what was approaching a conspiracy theory.  I thought it was implausible, but I listened to her. I realized for people like that and for tens of millions of other people around the United States, it is really hard to accept a reality where the United States is a second-rate power compared to China, where you’re in danger of losing not one, but two wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, where the economy is a mess, where people’s mortgages are underwater. I realize that a lot of this stuff maybe doesn’t apply to people in this room; but for people for whom it does apply, it is much easier to find one single person or group of people to blame for all their problems than it is to analyze the extremely complex subject of, for instance, mortgage-backed Wall Street securities, which most people can’t understand. So, you blame taxes, or you blame ObamaCare or you blame Obama himself.

The good news, I think, for fighting conspiracy theories, is that the United States, for all its problems now, is actually a wonderful place in one great respect — something that as a Canadian I’ve always admired — and that is its capacity for intellectual self-awareness and change. When you look back at the Civil Rights struggle, you don’t look at Canada or Europe, you look at the United States. In the space of just a generation or two, the United States succeeded in stigmatizing racism, sexism, homophobia, all different pathological forms of discrimination, basically removing them from the polite discourse of politics and even dinner party conversation. All this was done in the space of basically thirty or forty years — an unbelievable achievement in the history of human sociology.

If the United States can do this, if the United States can get rid of these other toxic ‘isms’ from its intellectual discourse, maybe it can do the same with conspiracism. I think one step, obviously, is to engage in conferences like this, which is why it was such a delight for me to come here and attend. Another is to read my book. But, I think a third step is to recognize the problem as a serious problem and not just make fun of people who seem to have odd theories about the way the world works. Its fun to make fun of tea-party types, or 9/11 truthers, or the people handing you leaflets on the street. But, it is a symptom of a serious problem, and I think you have to take the problem seriously. It is what I’ve tried to do in my research and I urge other people to do the same in theirs.

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.

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.