Among the Truthers

I’m on the syndicated NPR show Here & Now today, talking about my favourite subject: 9/11 conspiracy theories. The show page is here, with full audio available.

UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT
FOR THE DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA

ORLY TAITZ, Plaintiff
v.
MICHAEL ASTRUE, COMMISSIONER OF THE SOCIAL SECURITY ADMINISTRATION, Defendant.
Civil Action No. 11-402 (RCL)
MEMORANDUM OPINION

Before the Court is defendant’s Motion for Summary Judgment [21]. Upon consideration of defendant’s motion, plaintiff’s opposition [31], the reply thereto [32], the entire record herein, and the applicable law, the Court will grant summary judgment in defendant’s favor for the reasons set forth below.

I.    BACKGROUND

Ever persistent, plaintiff has once again come before this Court in an effort to uncover “the biggest cover up in the history of this nation.” Pl.’s Opp’n to Mot. for Summ. J. 20 [31]. She believes that the President is using a “fraudulently obtained” social security number and that the Social Security Administration—among other agencies—is involved in a scheme to “cover[] up social security fraud, IRS fraud, elections fraud and possibly treason” committed by the President. Id. at 5–6, 13. As her numerous filings with the Court demonstrate, plaintiff will stop at nothing to get to the bottom of this alleged conspiracy. Unfortunately for plaintiff, today is not her lucky day.

Read the rest here.

The ADL has a brief, but useful report on anti-semitic 9/11 conspiracy theories, titled Decade of Deceit: Anti-Semitic 9/11 Conspiracy Theories 10 Years Later. While none of the overall themes will be new to readers of Among The Truthers, the report serves as a concise mini-encyclopedia of the major Jew-obsessed players in the 9/11 conspiracy scene — including Gordon Duff, Alan Sabrosky, Jim Fetzer and Kevin Barrett (whom Among The Truthers readers will recognize for his starring role in Chapter 9 of the book). Worth a read.

The Federal Jack site has a bizarre article up titled “HURRICANE ERIN: The Category 3 Hurricane That Should Have Prevented 9/11 From Happening.” The argument is that “the government of the U.S. has had the ability to modify weather since the 196os” … and that it used this secret power to deflect a hurricane from the U.S. coast on Sept. 11, 2001 — thereby permitting the 9/11 plot to continue.

I have studied numerous 9/11 conspiracy theories. And I have studied numerous weather-control theories (particularly those surrounding HAARP and global warming). But seeing the two intermingled like this — that’s a first.

Very sad:

Interesting piece on the Birther web site WorldNetDaily:

Two candidates for the [GOP Presidential nomination] are mentioned over and over again – two wonderful, charismatic public servants whose only problem is they are not constitutionally eligible to be president. They are Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida and Gov. Bobby Jindal of Louisiana. Don’t get me wrong. I like both of these guys. If I were eligible to vote in Florida or Louisiana, I would vote to re-elect them. I would support either one for almost any job in America. But there is one job for which they are, by chance of birth, 100 percent, totally and inarguably ineligible to hold office – and that is the presidency of the United States. Why? Because both are sons of parents who were not U.S. citizens when they were born.

Of course, no one at WorldNetDaily — or anywhere else — was talking about the parental citizenship of these two men (except in the positive context of immigrants-made-good) before the explosion of Birther conspiracy theories that followed Barack Obama’s rise to prominence in 2008. Since then, Birthers who have not been able to prove that Obama was born in Kenya have used legal bafflegab as a fallback position, arguing spuriously that the natural-born-U.S.-citizen provision requires that both parents of a prospective presidential candidate be U.S. citizens at the time of birth.

The results is that there are a whole bunch of Republicans across the country — including Jindal and Rubio — whom the conspiracy theorists have been forced (out of a need to appear consistent) to declare verboten for the presidency.

Since these indirect victims of Birtherism are almost all partially Latino or Asian, it only reinforces the popular (but only partially warranted) view of Birtherism as a form of racism.

The world just witnessed the birth of a great new term, thanks to David Brooks of The New York Times: the “alternative-reality right,” which he defines as “those who don’t believe in global warming, evolution or that Obama was born in the U.S”

The September 11th attacks killed nearly 3,000 people in New York, Washington, and Pennsylvania — and shook our country to its core. And even now, ten years later, thousands of Americans still say they don’t believe the accepted narrative of what happened on that day. They call themselves “truthers” or “skeptics.” To many other Americans, they are simply conspiracy theorists –- confused, deluded, or worse. But how have these ideas stuck around for so long in the face of all the facts? And what do they say about our country? This hour On Point: the persistence of 9/11 conspiracy theories.

Guests:

James Meigs, editor-in-chief of Popular Mechanics magazine. Wrote the forward and afterward for Popular Mechanics’ book Debunking 9/11 Myths: Why Conspiracy Theories Can’t Stand Up to the Facts.

Jonathan Kay, author of Among the Truthers: A Journey Through America’s Growing Conspiracist Underground.

Kevin Ryan, co-editor of the Journal of 9/11 Studies.  Board director at Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth.

Listen to the show here.

Read the 1,300+ comments here.

p.s. I was particularly happy that, during the hour-long discussion, we were able to talk about some of the metallurgical details of the conspiracy theories. It’s rare that I get a chance, on radio, to use my 1980s-era engineering qualifications to respond in detail to nonsense about “thermite” and such.

It was also a pleasure to appear with Meigs — this was the first time I’d spoken with him — who has done more than any other person to debunk 9.11 conspiracism.

It’s all explained in this conspiracy theorist’s Youtube video. The whole theory revolves around the statue that stands outside the Toronto police headquarters on College Street near Bay. Take a peek next time you pass it.

p.s. Did you know that the Freemasons’ goal is to create “perfect hermaphrodite slaves” — which, apparently, is why the narrator of this video thinks the sculpture looks androgynous (see below). Anyone who wants to know what artist Eldon Garnet was actually trying to communicate with the sculpture can visit his web site here.

Dictatorships come in different flavours — communist, fascist, Islamist. Muammar Gaddafi’s dying regime doesn’t fit any of these boxes. What we’re witnessing in Tripoli is the extinction of a one-of-a-kind creature.

Gaddafi took power the old-fashioned Third World way — through a military coup. But once in control, he morphed into something more closely resembling a cult leader and quasi-mystic than a conventional Arab autocrat.

In the early years, Gaddafi would disappear for months of self-imposed “contemplative exile,” during which time he would scribble out revolutionary theories and receive apocalyptic visions of global confrontation. Western journalists who visited him have come away describing a tent-dwelling dreamer who imagined himself a pan-African king. He made clumsy passes at female reporters, and published an eccentric, all-knowing guide to life and politics — the “Green Book.” Gaddafi banned kindergartens, wrestling, and many forms of professional athletics, on the theory that “mass sport is a social need of human beings, so it is unacceptable from either a sporting or a democratic point of view to ‘subcontract’ [it] to others.”

Middle Eastern leaders ban all sorts of things in the name of Islam. But Gaddafi made it plain that his philosophy of life, “Third International Theory,” superseded Islam whenever his whim dictated. He wanted to run his nation the way Woody Allen ruled the fictional island of “San Marcos” in Bananas. In that movie, Allen’s character declared: “From this day on, the official language of San Marcos will be Swedish … In addition to that, all citizens will be required to change their underwear every half-hour. Underwear will be worn on the outside so we can check.” Yet that is scarcely more ridiculous than Gaddafi’s 1998 edict that “I would like Libya to become a black country. Hence, I recommend to Libyan men to marry only black women, and to Libyan women to marry black men.”

Unlike Gaddafi, most “normal” Arab dictators do not aspire to become philosopher kings. Certainly, Saddam Hussein and Syria’s Assad clan never bothered writing their own high-flown tracts: They slaughtered people to make their point. Their only cult (nominally encoded in the totalitarian dogmas of Ba’athism) was power and violence. When Assad père exterminated tens of thousands in the Hama uprising of 1982, as when Hussein gassed the Kurds and sent his helicopter gunships to mow down Shiites, the message was the same: Submit or die. They didn’t crave their citizens’ love — only their fear.

Gaddafi is the opposite: He’s a needy child who’s spent his whole career begging for love and admiration from any Third World murderer who might supply it. When he became a figure of mockery in the Arab world in the 1990s, he turned to black Africa, sending oil billions southward in return for getting his picture on postage stamps and posters, and being named to lead meaningless “pan-African” groups and conferences.

Gaddafi’s political art was to play one tribe off against the next. But conventional Middle East power politics doesn’t explain his oversized sense of mission. To the end — which seems imminent, as of this writing on Monday afternoon — he seems truly to believe that he has some holy mandate to deliver the world from Zionism, Western “colonialism” and other perceived evils.

In recent days, I’ve received some insight into this megalomaniacal mindset from an unlikely source. In her new book, “Inside Scientology,” Rolling Stone reporter Janet Reitman tells the story of how a mentally unbalanced pill-popping bigamist named L. Ron Hubbard turned his fevered space-opera fantasies and medical conspiracy theories into a cult-cum-business that, at the time of his death in 1986, was worth $400-million. Hubbard wasn’t a politician, but he was very much a fascist — as evidenced by the sadistic punishments meted out to “dissident” Scientologists, and by the creepy power-worship themes that suffused many of his hack science fiction stories.

Gaddafi and Hubbard were kindred spirits — and not just in the generic sense that all megalomaniacs resemble one another. Both “Colonel” Gaddafi and “Commodore” Hubbard had brief, undistinguished military careers, yet became obsessed with their own supposed power and heroism. Like James Bond villains, they both surrounded themselves with all-female retinues of nubile bodyguards and assistants (Hubbard’s were called the “Commodore’s Messengers”; Gaddafi’s were “the Amazonian Guard”). Both were paranoiacs, who spent their lives cranking out crackpot manifestos and nursing ancient grudges. In their old age, both began to appear to their followers wearing oversized turbans, as well as other strange costumes.

And yet, whatever their lunacies, these men exuded something that attracted fierce loyalty among otherwise sane people — a cult leader’s charisma that defied rational analysis. “He was very sharp and very quick,” one of Hubbard’s former roommates recalled to Reitman. “He could charm the sh-t out of anybody.”

No doubt, we’ll soon be hearing similar testimonies about Gaddafi, as Libyans try to understand how they allowed their nation to be turned into a false prophet’s plaything for more than four decades.

info@amongthetruthers.com

… in comic-book form.

Full show is available for download here.

Last Satuday, Rick Perry — long-term Texas governor, evangelical Christian, and expected GOP presidential hopeful — hosted “The Response,” a religious revival in Houston for “a nation in crisis.” Among the prominent Christians whose support is being trumpeted by event organizers: Oklahoma City-based pastor John Benefiel, who heads up the Heartland Apostolic Prayer Network. Here’s what Benefiel thinks about the Statue of Liberty: “You know where we got it from? French Freemasons. Listen, folks, that is an idol, a demonic idol right there in the middle of New York Harbor.”

Benefiel also believes there’s an Illuminatti/Freemason/gay plot to depopulate the earth through homosexuality (which, we learn, is a “stronghold” of the “demon god” Baal):

Homosexuality is a great way to control the population. Do you understand? I’m serious about this and I’ve seen this in lots of places, that the entity that we call the Illuminati which is really over, above Free Masonry, has stated it as their goal…to limit the world population to no more than 500 million. Do you realize that means getting rid of all of us? Because there’s between 6 and 7 billion people in the world today, and to get from 6 to 7 billion down to 500 million you gonna have to kill a lot of people off. What do you think the health care bill is? Oh yes, it’s a death culture. What about homosexuality, that’s a great way to limit the population. It’s not a great way it’s a perverted way, isn’t it.

All this has been known for a long time. Yet Benefiel’s name and photo still sit on The Response’s web site along with other “endorsers.”

I’ve reported before about the normalization of conspiracy theories in the evangelical, Tea Party fringe of the Republican Party. The fact that an allegedly mainstream GOP contender like Perry would publicly flaunt the endorsement of an out-and-out homophobic wing nut and conspiracy theorist like Benefiel suggests that Black Helicopters are continuing to find plenty of landing pads in America’s Republican heartland.

info@amongthetruthers.com

To understand why S&P lowered Washington’s credit rating on Friday, one need only compare two numbers: U.S. federal tax revenue and U.S. federal expenses as a percentage of GDP.

Under Ronald Reagan, the gap was, on average, about 4% (22% expenditure versus 18% revenue). It was the same 4% under George H. W. Bush. Bill Clinton cut the budget deficit in the early 1990s, and even ran a few surpluses — netting out at a shortfall of less than 1% for his eight years in the White House. But then George W. Bush came into office, pushed through deficit-driven tax cuts, and the red ink began to build again. Bush 43’s last year in office produced a 3% shortfall.

This, plus a financial crisis and major recession, is the situation Barack Obama inherited from Bush in 2009. His stimulus-driven spending binge, in conjunction with tax revenues that plummeted to 14% of GDP, produced an average spending-revenue gulf of 9% of GDP (24% versus 15%) over his tenure thus far — more than double what it was during the Reagan-Bush Sr. period. Yet even in the face of this crisis, Congressional leaders refuse either to raise taxes (even on the rich) or to cut short-term spending. Why has the most dynamic nation on earth succumbed to what can only be described as self-destructive paralysis?

Many blame the Tea Party movement. But the Tea Party didn’t materialize out of thin air. It is the product of an America that never really got over the fear and anxiety produced by 9/11, the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, and the real estate crash. The rise of China is another factor that figures large: Many Tea Partiers I’ve interviewed believe that America is destined to be the guiding force in world affairs in perpetuity, and they see Asia’s increasing pre-eminence as a sign that something is fundamentally wrong with the cosmos.

In times of crisis, all societies instinctively revert to romantic, backward-looking notions. There is a religious strain in this instinct: It is imagined that current trials result from the population deviating from some ancient revealed text, be it the Bible, the Koran, or the U.S. constitution. This is why at Tea Party events, there is such a strong correlation between religious Christianity and fiscal conservatism: The small-government pastoral frontier society of America’s formative years is idealized as a sort of Eden. (Some conservative Christian activists even blur the line between the Constitution and the Bible by claiming that the latter inspired the former — this being the thesis of a 1981 book, The 5,000 Year Leap, which Glenn Beck, among others, have credited with forming their political philosophy.) Continue reading →

The popular conspiracist web site Veterans Today has published an unusually ambitious piece that layers together several extravagant conspiracy theories about Afghanistan, al-Qaeda and the war on terror. The author, “Senior Editor” Gordon Duff, claims to have extensive inside information that demonstrates that the raid to kill OBL in Abbottabad was a fraud; and also that the weekend helicopter crash that killed 31 NATO troops was actually a murderous cover-up operation aimed at exterminating Navy SEALs who knew the truth about OBL and the previous operation:

Today 31 NATO troops, 20 of them Navy SEALs from the Osama bin Laden operation died in what is reported as a helicopter crash in Afghanistan. The chances of this story being true is almost nil.  The chances of this being a staged coverup is over 80%.  We believe these people were murdered to silence them.  This is why. We have solid information on two areas: (1) Osama bin Laden died in 2001 as an active CIA employee and his body was recovered in Afghanistan and taken to “the sand box.”  We were told it was frozen.  We have so much verification from this, CIA, ISI, US military and top officials.  I have a direct confirmation from Bin Laden’s CIA handler who I grilled mercilessly on this. (2) The Abbottabad operation involved numerous American deaths, witnessed, bodies all over, a helicopter crash. (suppressed translated TV interview below)  These bodies were recovered by land vehicle from Islamabad and there was NO “successful” bin Laden operation of any kind.  There was and has been a CIA safe house in Abbotabad where terror suspects were stored for years. This gave the US several areas of severe vulnerability.  Generally, Navy SEALs are the best people in the world at keeping their mouths shut, these are real team players, as the term “Seal Team” belies …

Read the rest here.

Over at FrumForum.com, my friend Tim Mak has an interesting blog post about the combination of NAFTA and Muslim-Brotherhood conspiracy theories merging …

What would happen if two of the most notorious conspiracies of the last decade converged to create a super-conspiracy?

As you might recall, writer David Horowitz condemned CPAC (the Conservative Political Action Conference) this year for the inclusion of Suhail Khan, a Muslim conservative who was a senior political appointee during the Bush administration.

Horowitz claimed that Khan had allegiances to the Muslim Brotherhood, and that the Brotherhood had been “wildly successful in its plan to become part of America’s civil culture and infiltrate the institutions of America’s civil governments.” That is the first conspiracy theory.

The second conspiracy theory is the belief that there is a plan to build a NAFTA superhighway through Mexico, Canada and the United States that would be the first step in the inevitable loss of American sovereignty through the formation of a North American Union and the creation of the ‘Amero’ currency. This conspiracy has been promoted by conspiracy-peddler Jerome Corsi.

(For some reason, the NAFTA superhighway is always drawn on maps featuring a critical juncture in Winnipeg, Manitoba, which is puzzling.)

The link between these two conspiracy theories was something I discovered in the course of reporting on a story on the Trans-Texas Corridor, a now-defunct project that would have involved the construction of a massive highway that would facilitate trade, rail and utility routes through Texas while bypassing urban centers.

It turns out that Suhail Khan was an Assistant to the Secretary for Policy at the Department for Transportation while the Trans-Texas Corridor was being considered.

There’s the connection – Muslim infiltration leading to the formation of a North American Union! Imagine what havoc the confluence of these two theories could wreck on those vulnerable to these types of ideas!

Of course, I’m a Canadian, so don’t take my word for it.

When Adolf Hitler moved to Vienna as a teenager in 1905, he was not an anti-Semite. Or at least, so he reports in the opening chapters of Mein Kampf: “In the Jew, I still saw a man who was [merely] of a different religion, and, therefore, on grounds of human tolerance, I was against the idea that he should be attacked because he had a different faith.”

But this attitude changed when Hitler had a chance to observe Vienna’s Jews, who were more distinct in their dress and habits that the Europeanized Jews of Linz. Hitler claimed that these Jews smelled bad, and seemed un-Germanic in their appearance. In time, he became convinced that Jews were inveterately foul and diseased — a metaphor for their effect on culture and politics. “Here was a pestilence, a moral pestilence, with which the public was being infected. It was worse than the black plague.”

In these few words, plucked from Hitler’s recollections of teenage life, we can glimpse the three delusions that would guide his genocidal project more than three decades later: (1) That the germ theory of disease can be applied to whole societies as well as to individual bodies; (2) That Jews are a deadly pathogen afflicting humanity; and (3) That he’d been ordained by Fate to save human civilization in exterminating this pathogen. Continue reading →

This is the sort of claim I would have dismissed as nonsense if one of my conspiracy-theorist correspondents had told me about it: The CIA operated a fake vaccine clinic in Pakistan in its bid to get bin Laden. Surely, I would have countered, the Agency has learned its lesson from the Cold War era, when it got caught using sinister medical and quasi-medical experiments that endangered the health of ordinary people.

But lo and behold, look what the respectable mainstream media is reporting:

This month, the Obama administration admitted that the Central Intelligence Agency had staged a fake vaccination campaign in Pakistan as American intelligence closed in on Osama Bin Laden. Health care workers were used on a clandestine mission—not in the paranoid imagination of America-hating fanatics but as part of the deliberate policy of the United States government.

Dumb move, Langley. Now every Pakistani conspiracy theorist looking to blame something on the Americans can point to the fake vaccine-plot as Exhibit A. After all, if American spooks are going to play fast and loose with hepatitis, what won’t they do?

At least, that’s how the Egyptian agriculture minister is spinning it.

Khaled Mouammar, outgoing President of the Canadian Arab Federation, has always has some fairly unhinged attitudes toward Israel. So maybe I shouldn’t be surprised that he is now distributing an article with the subject line “Possible Israeli Connection to Oslo Attacks.”

The article — which appeared on the anti-Semitic (and occasionally Holocaust-denying) web site www.veteranstoday.com — concludes as follows: “Increasingly, it looks like [the] Mossad’s fingerprints are all over [the Norway killings], perhaps cooperatively with CIA and/or MI6. Massive car bombs are one of their specialties. They’re experts at these type operations, using convenient stooges for plausible deniability, usually without their knowledge. Spread the word, and keep the pressure on Israel and its Washington paymaster/partner, masters of mass murder crimes.”

Here is the full article, as it appeared in the text of the email (the email address used for the distribution, benwalid@rogers.com, appears on Canadian Arab Federation press releases such as this one): Continue reading →

It’s been 100 hours since Anders Behring Breivik began killing people. The reason he did so is no secret: He has told the world that he wanted to punish Norway’s rulers for their allegedly pro-Islamic policies and embrace of multiculturalism. His 1,518-page manifesto also tells us that he wanted to set off a race war that would result in the cleansing of Muslims from Europe. Perhaps never in the history of mass murder has a killer set out his views in such lucid detail.

Despite this, and somewhat predictably, numerous conspiracy theories already have emerged — with each seeking to cast Breivik’s killing as part of a larger, nefarious plot. As the list below shows, the theories differ widely about the “real” motives for the slaughter.

1. It’s a Hitler-Reichstag-style false-flag plot by Islamists and leftists to discredit conservative opposition to multicultural policies.

The lead on this conspiracy theory is being taken by (who else) the folks at WorldNetDaily, a site that has become infamous as a clearinghouse for right-wing Obama Birther conspiracy theories. Here’s an excerpt from an article posted on the site over the weekend:

“This has all the appearances of a cover-up,” radio host Michael Savage told WND. “They created their Reichstag fire. They found their Timothy McVeigh. They created their Jack Ruby. How could one man have blown up the downtown and then raced to the island to kill the teens?

“This is likely a fabrication of the Labour Party, who needs to hold onto power to enforce their multi-culturalist, Muslim-favoring, anti-nationalist views,” he continued, “especially in light of the earlier ‘credit’ for this atrocity claimed by the radical Muslim group whose leader they were threatening to deport.

“The official story defies logic in the following sense as well,” he continued, “if this lone right-winger hated Muslims, as the New York Times is reporting, then why did he slaughter his own people and not Muslims?”

Vidkun Quisling, as Savage reminded his listening audience yesterday, became president in a Nazi-backed coup and collaborated with Hitler in the dictator’s “Final Solution” plan to exterminate Jews.

2. It’s all part of a plot by “globalists” to ram their collectivist economic agenda down the throats of a fearful and confused European population.

As noted earlier on this blog, the lead on this one is being taken by Alex Jones’ site Infowars.

The false flag attack in Norway arrives as populism grows in Germany, Europe’s reluctant paymaster for the contrived debt-based economic crisis. Establishment politicians in Germany have balked at a second bankster bailout … The EU and the European political establishment are beholden to the bankers and their “free market” – as in free to loot and plunder – neoliberal policies and have now pulled 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 Behring Breivik to Timothy McVeigh. Hours after the terrorist attack, Norway’s public broadcaster NRK cited Tore Bjørgo at the Police College in Oslo who said the attack resembled the bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City. The 1995 attack blamed on Timothy McVeigh killed 168 people …

The Oklahoma City bombing was a false flag event used to roll out several draconian aspects of the police state in the 1990s … Breivik is obviously a patsy for a Gladio operation to destroy political opposition to the bankers. Operation Gladio was a “strategy of tension” devised by the elite that employed terrorism – assassination and bombings – to discredit political opponents in Europe. It was set-up by the CIA and staffed in part with former members of Mussolini’s secret police.

3. It was actually an Israeli massacre, designed to punish Norway’s pro-Palestinian politicians and activists.

9/11 conspiracist Kevin Barrett (who likes to talk about the Holocaust being a “sacred myth”) is taking the lead on this one, naturally. In a Monday blog post, he quotes plenty of like-minded conspiracy theorists who are ready to lay this blood libel at Israel’s feet. All follow the logic that — to quote a representative entry — “Friday’s bloodbath in progressive Norway bears the markings of an Israeli Mossad false flag terror attack. No Western country has supported the Palestinian cause more than the Norwegians.”

Incidentally, over at the quasi-respectable hyper-left-wing anti-Israeli site Counterpunch, Vijay Prashad has produced his own soft-boiled version of this same conspiracy theory — though he can’t quite bring himself to go beyond vagaries:

Above my desk I have a poster from a demonstration led the Anti-Fascistik Aktion in Copenhagen in June 1995. “No Fucking Fascists,” it says. That is the sentiment of the more than ninety young people of the AUF killed last week. Breivik was certainly a right-wing militant, and without a doubt inspired by the Euro-fascism of Merkel-Sarkozy-Cameron. The press might be obsessed by their “lone gun-man” theory. They see things in the police’s terms, which is to say, in terms of who actually acted, and who provided material support for the action. The action in Utøya was not the act of a madman, and it was not a human tragedy. It was an act of political murder against people who had committed themselves to a convivial world not only for their beloved Norway, but also for those who live under Occupation elsewhere.

info@amongthetruthers.com

Anders Behring Breivik is not only a terrorist and a murderer, but also a plagiarist: Sections from his 1,500-page manifesto were copied directly from that of the “Unabomber,” Ted Kaczynski. And even the material he wrote himself is derivative: From the parts of the rambling and disjointed manifesto that I have been able to read thus far, his bigoted and paranoid worldview seems to have originated — either directly or indirectly — with The Turner Diaries, a hack science fiction novel written 33 years ago by an American white supremacist named William Luther Pierce. The Turner Diaries feature prominently on a Swedish Nazi Internet forum called Nordisk, of which Breivick was a member.

Like Breivick, Pierce’s terrorist protagonist (“Earl Turner”) was a do-it-yourself bomb-builder who attacked a large public building with a car bomb largely consisting of ammonium nitrate fertilizer-based explosives, and then used firearms to kill innocent people randomly. As with Breivick, Pierce casts Turner as a revolutionary patriot, attacking a decadent and race-treasonous government. Like Breivick, Turner sought to set off an apocalyptic race war that would cleanse his society of “foreign” elements.

Breivick seems to have absorbed a variety of plot details from The Turner Diaries. For instance, Turner is described in Pierce’s book as being the leader of one of 12 terrorist cells in the Washington, D.C. area. After successfully blowing up the FBI building in Washington, he and other loyal cell leaders are inducted into a secret terrorist society called The Order, which is pledged to the eradication of blacks and Jews. Breivick claims to have been part of a similarly clandestine group whose goal was to “seize political and military control of Western European countries,” killing or wounding more than a million people in the process. He describes a Turner-style council of exactly 12 cell leaders from different parts of the Western world, which (he says) met in London in 2002 to create their own secret society — a reinvention of the Knights Templar. (He signs off his letter with the title “Justiciar Knight Commander for Knights Templar Europe and one of several leaders of the National and pan-European Patriotic Resistance Movement.”)

Many commentators are calling Breivick “Norway’s Timothy McVeigh” — a reference to the right-wing American terrorist who bombed the Oklahoma City federal building in 1995. There is some basis to this: McVeigh called The Turner Diaries his “bible,” and sold copies of it to like-minded extremists. His criminal plot, like Breivick’s, was almost identical to the one described in Pierce’s book.

Yet there are also important differences between Breivick and McVeigh, between the pre-9/11 era of right-wing extremism and the post-9/11 variety on tragic display in Norway. And they are worth exploring, through the lens of The Turner Diaries, which — though largely unread and unknown in mainstream Western societies — has become an immensely influential underground inspiration for two generations of white-supremacist murderers. Continue reading →

Well, that didn’t take long. Less than 24 hours after the Norway killings, Alex Jones’ massively-surfed Infowars site already is fronting with the theory that the tragedy was all part of a conspiracy by European elites to deflect populist disgust at bailouts:

The false flag attack in Norway arrives as populism grows in Germany, Europe’s reluctant paymaster for the contrived debt-based economic crisis. Establishment politicians in Germany have balked at a second bankster bailout … The EU and the European political establishment are beholden to the bankers and their “free market” – as in free to loot and plunder – neoliberal policies and have now pulled 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 Behring Breivik to Timothy McVeigh. Hours after the terrorist attack, Norway’s public broadcaster NRK cited Tore Bjørgo at the Police College in Oslo who said the attack resembled the bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City. The 1995 attack blamed on Timothy McVeigh killed 168 people …

The Oklahoma City bombing was a false flag event used to roll out several draconian aspects of the police state in the 1990s … Breivik is obviously a patsy for a Gladio operation to destroy political opposition to the bankers. Operation Gladio was a “strategy of tension” devised by the elite that employed terrorism – assassination and bombings – to discredit political opponents in Europe. It was set-up by the CIA and staffed in part with former members of Mussolini’s secret police.

This is the first of many conspiracy theories of this type that will circulate on this subject, I predict. I also wouldn’t be surprised if a few hard-right conspiracists jump in with the idea that Breivik is in fact a patsy for a Muslim group — or perhaps for Islamist stooges who themselves are trying to discredit the war on Islamist terror.

6pm update: Well, here we go — just like I predicted in the previous paragraph: the first of what no doubt will be many, this one from Pamela Geller:

While the leftist and Islamic supremacist ghouls rush to portray Norway mass murderer Anders Behring Breivik as a Christian and even as an anti-jihadist, the unanswered questions multiply. Why did a jihad group take credit for the atrocities, and then retract? And who altered the murderer’s Facebook page? Yesterday, at the time that his name was released, his Facebook page looked like this …

And guess what? He doesn’t like it!

Alas, Kay totally avoids all scientific evidence from the outset referring the reader to the National Institute of Standards and Technology or NIST Reports, “debunking websites” and the 9/11 Commission Report for answers to those and dozens of other critical “niggling anomalies.” Kay peddles the notion that only “the credentialed intellectual establishment” are “trueexperts” having the capability to comprehend the meaning of such complex matters like a falling object or melting of steel. What he neglects to tell the reader is that none of his “credentialed intellectual establishment” ever addressed the above-mentioned evidence, or dozens of other problems with the official story.

It would be as if Kay travelling back to the early 1600’s, avoided all Galileo’s observations of planetary motions that bought him to question the official geocentric universe. Rather than address the evidence, Kay would psychoanalyze Galileo and his followers’ personal habits and beliefs in an effort to “understand” why Galileo dared to consider such blasphemies. No doubt Kay would simply dismiss his planetary anomalies stating the science has been settled for well over 1000 years, and referred the reader to Ptolemy, the Bible, Aristotle and “the credentialed intellectual establishment” for answers to that heretic’s niggling observations.

Read the rest here.

p.s. Four-thousand words for a book review? I’m honoured, I guess. But it’s still not as long as this 11,000-word monster.

I recently wrote a lengthy article for the National Post called “Once again, the Jewish question,” in which I argue that Palestinians and Jews remain miles apart on the fundamental question of Israel’s religious identity. During my interviews in Ramallah, I noted that conspiracy theories composed a disturbingly prominent part of the Palestinian narrative:

How do things move forward on the Palestinian side? Some Western pro-Israeli groups are urging Palestinian leaders to begin with a simple symbolic step: acknowledging Israel’s Jewish character. In a widely promoted article reprinted in the National Post, for instance, the Simon Wiesenthal Center announced a “six words” campaign centred on the slogan “I will accept a Jewish state.”

The message seems eminently reasonable in Israel and the West. But when I put the proposition to people in Ramallah, I couldn’t find anyone who’d agree.

“That’s stupid!” bluntly declares Mahmoud Labadi, a charismatic, oldguard PA apparatchik. “Why doesn’t Canada declare itself a Christian state? Why doesn’t the United States declare itself a WASP state? Why? Look at the United States and Canada, with all cultures and religions and races side by side.. To exclude all other religions and cultures and minorities – as a Canadian, how can you accept that? It’s a racist argument. It’s like me declaring Palestine as a Muslim state. This is a twisted logic. It’s evil.”

Then, he launched himself into the realm of fantasy by claiming that the entire Jewish historical claim to Jerusalem’s core is bogus, because no Jewish temple ever existed in the area.

Palestinian leaders have fallen back on this insulting conspiracy theory for years. It’s become part of Fatah lore. But this was the first time I’d been assailed by it in person, and I was somewhat shocked by the experience.

“This temple – I will tell you frankly, this is not a Jewish temple,” he went on. “This is a myth. This was a palace – a palace where David and Solomon lived. [The Jews] are looking everywhere in [Jerusalem's Old City] to find some traces. Until now, 43 years of occupation, they couldn’t find any real trace of any kind of temple. It’s mythology they build in their heads. You know what I say – I’ve told this to some Jewish counterparts – pick the highest mountain in Jerusalem and build your [new] temple there.” (Remaining firmly in the sphere of conspiracy theory, Labadi then rehashed the debunked claim that Israeli archeologists are plotting to destroy the Dome of the Rock, which sits on the Temple Mount.)

As with all backward-looking conspiracy theories, this one is being used to advance a forward-looking agenda – which is to strip Israel of its historical identity as the homeland for the Jewish people. As Yasser Arafat himself understood when he first blindsided Israeli and American peace negotiators with his crackpot history, an Israel disconnected from Jewish history wouldn’t have any basis to reject the “right of return” claimed by the descendants of 1948-era Palestinian refugees, nor the collective solidarity necessary to continue the exhausting fight against its Arab neighbours.

Read the rest here.

Conspiracist movements always, inevitably, bump up against the problem of explaining why their epic “truths” aren’t accepted by mainstream society. This has been true in recent months of Obama Birthers, who have become more marginalized and ridiculed now that the President has released the “long-form” birth certificate they were forever going on about. The solution, as with all conspiracy theorists, is to allege that a massive cover-up and psy-ops operation is part of the conspiracy — and, of course, that the media has been co-opted into this enterprise.

And so, on Birth-central, aka WorldNetDaily, mega-Truther James Corsi launches the claim that Obama is deploying no fewer than 100 agents to suppress the truth of Birtherism. Corsi’s source for this shocking claim? An obscure Obama conspiracy theorist named Ed Hale. Here is the “proof” that Corsi puts up on WND, consisting of Hale’s dubious account of a phone call with an allegedly drunk person — Jim Johnson — who he alleges is Obama fixer:

The rest of Corsi’s post consists of him launching his brain down the rabbit hole of internet sleuthing to find screen names and other digital fingerprints on message boards in an effort to prove Hale’s “Army of 100″ sub-Birther conspiracy theory. Those interested in the tedious details, complete with the obligatory gotcha screen shots from facebook pages and discussion fora can find them here.

The article ends with this ominous line about Johnson: “He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, the Trilateral Commission and the American Friends of Bilderberg.”

Cue the spooky music.

Journalism is a funny business. The “worthy” articles and essays that you spend days, weeks or even months laboring over sometimes are the ones that get the least attention. On the other hand, a throwaway blog post that might have taken you 20 an hours or two to write goes viral, generating tens of thousands of hits and dozens of reprints all over the web.

Such was the case for The Atlantic’s Conor Friedersdorf, who typically writes about weighty issues connected with “politics and national affairs.” He’s a good writer — even if you’ve never heard of him. Until now.

What has put Friedersdorf on the map is one of those dashed-off blog posts I referred to in the first paragraph. A few days ago, Friedersdor went to see a midnight showing of “The Undefeated,” a limited-release Sarah Palin propaganda film then playing in 10 theatres, including one in Orange County, Calif., where Friedersdorf happened to be visiting his parents. He wrote an article for The Atlantic’s web site about the experience, whose title — “Sarah Palin Movie Debuts to Empty Theater in Orange County” — sums up his thesis.

The tone of the piece might be describes as snark lite. He ends his reportage, for instance, by asking the theater manager: “In hindsight, do you wish you’d had one more screen showing ‘Harry Potter’?” But overall, the tone isn’t as scathing as you’d expect from a snickering “lamestream” egghead. Good writers let the facts speak for themselves. And the fact that no one in Orange County wanted to see “The Undefeated” tells us a lot about Sarah Palin’s dimming political fortunes now that Michele Bachmann has become the Tea Party’s alpha female.

Read the rest here.

If you’re a fan of 1970s-style science-fiction special effects, the first 60 seconds of Richard D. Hall’s “Richplanet Starship” are worth watching. He even has made up his TV set to look like the deck of a starship.

“Veterans Today” sounds like a reputable web site, doesn’t it? And in fact, many of the articles on the site are of legitimate interest to veterans of the U.S. military, the site‘s ostensible audience. But as the Southern Poverty Law Center has determined, the site also has become a major center for 9/11 conspiracism — with a strong focus on the sub-niche of 9/11 conspiracy theories that blame Israel (and specifically the Mossad) for the plot to blow up the World Trade Center. Leading conspiracy theorists on the site include “senior editor” Gordon Duff (a former marine) and Alan Sabrosky, who also is a marine veteran (and describes himself as one quarter Jewish).

A major theme on the site is that America and its foreign policy are controlled by Israel. At times, the material on the site goes beyond anti-Israeli extremism, and slides into outright anti-Semitism — even Holocaust denial. (Oh, and they don’t like me very much either.)

This week, Veterans Today is chalking up hits with a video that shows Sabrosky on Iranian “Press TV” spinning his 9/11 nonsense. There isn’t much in the video that will be new to followers of 9/11 conspiracy theories, but the video is being promoted with unusual vigour in the conspiracist community (at least three people have emailed me a link) — perhaps because many mistakenly think that Press TV (which, like “Veterans Today,” has a respectable-sounding name) is taken seriously in the West.

It’s not. The site is an Iranian propaganda network. And so it’s no big surprise why its producers welcome 9/11 conspiracy theorists onto their airwaves.

Got it for this article … So many people to thank!

The conspiracists at WorldNetDaily are at it again — this time with a new theory that the BATF’s Mexican Project Gunrunner adventure was actually about discrediting private gun-owners.

This is, of course, part of a long-running meme in right-conspiracist circles: The idea that the government is endlessly plotting to take away the guns of righteous god-fearing American citizens.

Sarah Elliott, author of the Swallowing The Camel blog, is not a Truther herself. But she has a very interesting personal perspective on the Truther community. And her remarks about my book, the 9/11 Truth movement, and especially the problem of anti-Semitism within Truther ranks, are very interesting.

By now, the whole world knows that Richard Falk, the UN Human Rights Council’s “expert” on the Palestinians, published an anti-Semitic cartoon of a Jewish dog feasting on human blood (see above). We also know that Falk took the cartoon down when criticized, lied about it, and then admitted that he’d posted the cartoon but said that it was fine. The timeline appears here.

Should we be surprised by this? I blogged at length about Falk’s shrill anti-Israeli attitudes as early as 2008. And as I note in Among The Truthers, he is a 9/11 conspiracy theorist who supplied the foreword to David Ray Griffin’s Truther bible The New Pearl Harbor.

Falk’s dark conspiracism — which, the cartoon suggests, now seems to have curdled into something resembling outright bigotry — has remained somewhat under the radar until now. A few weeks ago, I appeared on Sonali Kolhatkar’s popular California-based radio show Uprising. When I mentioned to the left-leaning host that Richard Falk was a conspiracy theorist, she literally couldn’t believe it — and I actually had to follow up with her by email to provide a link to the online edition of David Ray Griffin’s book.

Falk is an intelligent academic with a Princeton pedigree and a long list of legitimate academic credentials and professional accomplishments. His descent into paranoia and hate demonstrates that brains are no foolproof defense against the lure of conspiracism.

One of the interesting aspects of conspiracy theorists that I’ve noted in my book is the brittle, cultish social dynamic that prevails on conspiracist web sites and discussion fora: Conspiracy theorists may appear confident and blustery, but they are actually quite insecure about their dogmas, and lash out (or, if possible, censor) those who question them.

A great example of this comes to us via well-known 9/11 Truther James Fetzer, who lately has been putting out feelers into the world of holocaust denial. As discussed on the (non-conspiracist) Holocaust Controversies web site, Fetzer does not declare himself a Holocaust denier: He’s undecided, and simply thinks more research and “open discussion” is needed. But that isn’t good enough for the hardcore deniers, with whom he got into a vicious slagging match at the anti-Semitic, Holocaust-denying CODOH Revisionist forum.

The whole exchange, a blow-by-blow account of which appears here, is fascinating for those of us interested in the psychology of conspiracy theorists. But for me, the most fascinating line was this line from Fetzer’s main critic on the CODOH site:

I find your [i.e. Fetzer's] work on 9/11 to be spot-on, and I commended you for it. Ultimately though, in totality, you are little more than the typical academic hypocrite of the type you to criticize. I’m afraid you have the cart before the horse, you will get nowhere until the Jewish Supremacist power base, that being the ‘holocaust’ lies, is stripped away. If you refuse to discuss the ‘holocaust’ tales, or even ask questions about it in order to learn, then perhaps you should go elsewhere.

Variations of this decree appear in one form or another on just about every conspiracy web site I visit: According to this cultish mindset, you must either submit to the conspiracist dogma, or leave. The merely “open-minded” are not welcome.

I am at the Yad Vashem center for holocaust studies in Jerusalem for a week, attending lectures by experts on the subject of anti-Semitism. In today’s coursework, an amazing story emerged about a bizarre episode that unfolded at the humanities department of Hebrew University.

Apparently, there are a few Japanese Christian sects that adore Israel. Three or four years ago, one of them sent a delegation of about a dozen members to Hebrew U in Jerusalem, to express their affection — and donate a cheque for $1-million.

So the Japanese show up, a reception is organized, and the donation ceremony commences. Through a translator, the leader of the Japanese delegation begins his explanation of all the reasons that Jews should be admired. “You Jews are amazing,” he told the crowd. “You control the media. You control the banks. You are to be emulated!”

Everyone in the room was mortified. But then it got worse. Along with the cheque, the Japanese visitors presented a book as a gift. The stunned translator looked down and saw that it was The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Not only did the Japanese think that it was a legitimate document — but also that Jewish representatives of an Israeli university would want to receive a copy as a present.

Needless to say, everyone at Hebrew U was shocked. But they kept the $1-million.

This week, Greece and its coast guard effectively put an end to the second Gaza “flotilla” — by banning the assembled Gaza-bound flotilla ships from leaving Greece’s ports. Already, pro-Palestinian web sites are abloom with denunciations of the Greek move.

Prediction #1: The term “Greco-Zionist” will start popping up on Google hits in coming days.

Prediction #2: A conspiracy theory will take root that says Greece agreed to block the flotilla — on behalf of the United States and Israel — in exchange for a financial bailout.

This has been around since 2010, but I only saw it now. It’s great:

In Among The Truthers, I admit that I have never won an argument with a conspiracy theorist. This is not because the conspiracists are right, but because they typically have memorized so many isolated factoids that it is impossible to bat them all away within the context of a conventional back-and-forth discussion.

I mention this for the benefit of David Aaronovitch, an extremely smart writer who has written his own very fine book about conspiracy theories. According to the email report below, which came to me from one of my Truther correspondents, Aaronovitch is musing a debate with Richard Gage, a Truther extraordinaire whom I’ve seen and written about several times.

If he goes through with it, I’d love to be in the audience.

Press Release for Reinvestigate 911

contact 079469 39217 or 0752 8618917

David Aaronovitch Promises Debate with 9/11 Sceptic Richard Gage, Gage takes London and Bristol by storm

Some 250 people braved a chilly Monday evening to hear world renowned US architect Richard Gage demolish the US governments’ version of 9/11 at the main lecture room in the Royal Instsitute of British Architects this week. The Times’ David Aaronovitch, a leading media cheerleader for the official 9/11 story, was present and accepted a challenge to debate the issue in public.

The meeting in Bristol the next day saw an even higher turnout. People were turned away from the standing room only meeting at Colston Hall.

In contrast to the corporate media outlets in London, the local media coverage of the Bristol event included a front page article in the Bristol Evening Post entitled ’911:The Bombs Theory’, a double page spread and a leading article entitled ‘In Praise of Richard Gage’ who is described as a ‘brave man’. Richard Gage did an interview on Radio Bristol on the Tuesday morning and other local radio stations all covered the event including Jack FM, Bristol Community Radio and Ujimma Radio. As a result of extensive leafleting of the Bristol University Engineering Department and a mailshot to every Architechtural and Engineering practice in the city there was a good turn out from the professional community.

The London audience included a wide range of people of all ages and backgrounds including, engineering students, radical young activists, peace movement people, sceptics and those who were simply curious. There were writers from The Times, the Guardian and various other freelancers as well as Press TV and Paradign Shift TV. The team from the BBC News department under producer Mike Rudin, currently making a “Conspiracy Files” programme on the topics of Gage’s presentation, did not bother to attend. Continue reading →

A 9/11 Truther names Ryan Penn sent me an interesting note after hearing me on the radio this week:

I heard you on the radio a few weeks ago … You stated that a conspiracy/secret with too many people involved could never be keep a secret. Hmmmm … How many people were involved in the Manhattan Project? They were able to keep this a secret  (estimates are as high as 60,000 people were involved in some way).

Thanks for the note, Ryan. I am familiar with the Manhattan-Project argument because it figures in Loose Change and various other 9/11 Truther movies. But it doesn’t support your point. That’s because of a key detail: The Manhattan Project was secret but legal. A plot to destroy the World Trade Center, on the other hand, would have been an illegal conspiracy to commit mass-murder. See the difference?

In the case of the Manhattan Project, it’s legal nature meant that it could be funded by legitimate government sources, housed in massive well-appointed, well-guarded facilities on government property, and staffed with (as you say) tens of thousands of individuals properly briefed in legitimate government security protocols. The fact that most or all of these people kept their mouths shut as ordered wasn’t because they were taking part of a secret scheme — but because they rightly regarded their efforts as part of a patriotic project to win World War II. If these people had instead been working on a criminal enterprise to slaughter America’s own citizens, you can bet that legions of them would have come forward once they’d understood the details of what they were being asked to do.

In any case, for the Manhattan-Project analogy to work with 9/11 Truth, the facts would have to be very different: The entire operation would have to have been kept secret, not only during WWII, but during the entire decade after, i.e. until 1955 (this decade-long period corresponding to the decade that has passed between 9/11 and 2011).

And obviously, that never happened.

The Canadian Charger is a fringe web-only publication that peddles anti-Western, anti-Israeli and pseudo-science conspiracy theories — including 9/11 Trutherism and the idea that authorities are covering up evidence that wi-fi computer networks are a threat to our health. So it’s no surprise that the Charger doesn’t like Among The Truthers.

Still, I was honoured by association when the Charger published an article entitled “Jonathan Kay is at it again. But why?” in which I was lumped in with a lot of folks well above my intellectual pay grade, including Joseph Lieberman, William Kristol and Charles Krauthammer.

Apparently, we’re all part of a scheme aimed “at pointing audiences away from the reality that many conscientious professionals have already demonstrated: that the evidence does not support the official version of 9/11.”

If only! Then maybe Krauthammer would have agreed to my request for a back-of-the-book blurb.

Iran is putting on a “counter-terrorism” conference that acts as a platform for bashing the West and promoting 9/11 conspiracy theories. Ho hum: Nothing new about that. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has been spouting 9/11 Trutherism for years. What is new is that this event has the imprimatur of UN Secretary General Ban-ki Moon.

On the other hand, what should be expect from the United Nations given that its Special Rapporteur on Palestinian human rights, Richard Falk, is himself an out-and-out 9/11 conspiracy theorist:

I’ve been doing a bunch of interviews connected with Among The Truthers over the last two months. In some cases, they’ve come so thick and fast that I haven’t had a chance to do any research on the person or outlet doing the interviewing. Such was the case with this recent interview with Canadian radio host Barry Shainbaum. Listen to the first few minutes of the interview, and perhaps you can hear the surprise in my voice when it becomes clear that the guy is … Well, you be the judge as to whether he’s a Truther/Birther or not. I’ve been at this for a while, and my spidey sense says yes.

Audio can be found here. This was an unusually in-depth interview with a host who clearly had attacked the book with a highlighter and a pack of post-it notes.

When I debate 9/11 conspiracy theorists, one of my main arguments goes like this: “A conspiracy to bomb the World Trade Center would have required hundreds of government operatives. How come, a decade later, none of them have come forward. Wouldn’t we expect some of these guilt-ridden spooks and technicians to come forward, especially now that their erstwhile boss, George W. Bush, is out of the White House?”

To which some conspiracy theorists reply that a “Bush insider” has come forward — Morgan Reynolds. And it’s true: Reynolds did briefly work for the Bush administration, as chief economist for the United States Department of Labor, during Bush’s first term — and he has been a Truther since 2005.

What the conspiracy theorists won’t tell you is that Reynolds’ Truther conspiracy theories have nothing to do with anything he learned in government. As this recently posted video of him shows, all of his Truther talking points are the standard cookie-cutter nonsense you can get from David Ray Griffin’s The New Pearl Harbor and other standard conspiracist tracts.

I did a really fun in-studio hour on Don Rodricks Midday show at Baltimore’s WYPR. Audio is available here.

Incidentally, Rodricks himself happens to know a thing or two about crackpot theories — including one related to Lyme disease.

I hadn’t much heard the term “Agenda 21″ in conspiracist circles until recently. But now it’s become all the rage on the major sites. The basic gist is that the UN is laying the groundwork to take away your house under the guise of “sustainable development”:

‘Sustainable Development’ sounds like a nice idea, right?  It sounds nice, until you scratch the surface and find that Agenda 21 and Sustainable Development are really cloaked plans to impose the tenets of Social Justice/Socialism on the world.

At risk from Agenda 21;

• Private Property ownership
• Single-Family homes
• Private car ownership and individual travel choices
• Privately owned farms

The Agenda 21 plan openly targets private property.  For over thirty-five years the UN has made their stance very clear on the issue of individuals owning land.

The Agenda 21 conspiracy theory fits into the Alex Jones model of conspiracy theories that fixate on the idea that the United States government is using the UN as a proxy to take basic rights away from American citizens (a bizarre premise given that Washington, like just about everyone else, regularly flouts UN diktats). More particularly, it transfers the popular world-government-taking-away-our-guns conspiracist meme to the realm of real estate.

It also brings George Soros into the picture — thereby linking it with the obsessional anti-Soros mythology of Glenn Beck.

As noted previously, people have been contacting me to tell me about loved ones who have become lost to their families because of conspiracism. Here’s another sad message in that genre.

Hi Jonathan, I heard you on radio 4 this morning and have been looking you up online. My brother has fallen down the rabbit hole and we are now permanently estranged. It was good to hear your perspective – and to put these things in perspective for me too. Since becoming a slave to Alex ‘Ranter’ Jones he is so full of anger, and anyone that doesn’t validate his nutty belief system is a target for that anger. He is busy putting himself beyond the pale with violent outbursts against family members and is alienating himself into a very lonely place should he ever pop his head back up again. I doubt that will happen though, I think you’re right, generally once they’ve lost it then they’ve lost it for good. Other people have said this is mental illness, I disagree, I think he made a choice and that choice is going to have long term consequences. I’m surprised nobody has done a paper on the pathology and psychology of succumbing to ‘truthing’. I’ve looked but I can’t find anything. If you know of anyone donig a study on this then please let me know. I’m glad you’ve written the book as a warning, but sadly I think the people who would read the book and take it on board are not the people who are going to be susceptible to the hardline CT’s. And sadly I already know what it says.

A great interview by an unabashedly progressive host. You can listen to the audio here.

Visit here to listen. My interview takes place between 1:42:00 and 1:49:00.