Among the Truthers

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.

A British journalist who just interviewed me asked me to tick off the “top 10 conspiracy theories” making the rounds. In no particular order, here’s what I came up with:

1. 9/11 Truth: The notion that elements within the American government engineered the 9/11 terrorist attacks as a pretext to attack Afghanistan and Iraq.
2. Obama Birtherism: The notion that Barack Obama is an illegal alien who is constitutionally ineligible to be U.S. president and, in its more ambitious variants, is a Manchurian Candidate-style pawn of some nefarious foreign power, such as Islamism or communism.
3. Vaccine conspiracy theories: These take several forms. But the most popular is the enduring hoax that the MMR vaccine causes autism. Another has it that seasonal flu vaccines are part of a plot to exterminate human beings to “cull the herd”
4. HAARP: The High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program, based in Alaska, is a radio research facility that, for some reason, has become an object of fascination among conspiracy theorists. They blame everything from Japan’s earthquakes to American tornadoes on HAARP.
5. “Chemtrails.” This is what conspiracy theorists call contrails — the white streams of condensation that emit from passenger aircraft and appear as white lines in the sky. They are harmless, but conspiracy theorists are certain that they contain harmful chemicals meant to poison us or render us docile for the benefit of the powers that be.
6. Bilderbegers. The Bilderberg meeting takes place every year as a wonky transatlantic confab involving American and European elites discussing foreign policy and international trade. Conspiracy theorists have decided that it is actually a sort of all-controlling star chamber where the fate of the world is decided.
7. FEMA concentration camps. There is a widespread belief among American conspiracy theorists that the Federal Emergency Management Agency — which provides help to victims of such disasters as Hurricane Katrina — is actually part of a secret plot to imprison millions of American “dissidents,” take away their guns, and otherwise turn patriots into prisoners of Washington’s tyrants.
8. Water fluoridation. Yes, this one is still around — even though water fluoridation has been used safely for well over half a century. Water fluoridation claim that the technology was invented by the Nazis as a means to control captive populations.
9. Global warning conspiracy theories. Many conservatives have become convinced that the global warming is a deliberate fraud designed by Luddites to destroy the world’s corporations and push humanity back to the pre-industrial age.
10. Libyan conspiracy theories. A popular theory making the rounds is that Obama attacked Libya because Qaddafi was going to switch Libya, and the rest of Africa, onto a pan-African currency called the “gold dinar,” which would destroy the supremacy of the U.S. dollar, empower the world’s poor, and bankrupt Western nations.

I’m getting a lot of notes like this one. Very sad.

Dear Sir,

I recently lost my wife, don’t worry she’s not dead, (OK maybe a little in the brain). she’s lost to conspiracy. It took about 5 years starting with listening to Coast to Coast and then Alex Jones, 9-11 Truth, hollow moon, HAARP, flu vaccines, fluoride, aspartame,religion and final stop (at the time of our departure) the birther movement. This of course led her to attend a mock trial in New York city. Obama was to stand trial for treason and sedition, my ex would wind up as a member of the jury and that’s where she would meet her soon to be new husband. A full fledged member of the tin foil hat society. Straight out of Texas, ammunition shed around back of the house, a framed copy of the Declaration of independence on display and a mini Constitution (earmarked to the 2nd amendment no doubt)  in his back pocket. She moved down to Texas with him last year and they happily record videos for youtube and stock up on survival gear, ammunition and arms for the upcoming apocalypse! If it’s on the Internet or if Alex Jones “reports” on it, then they bit in hook, line and sinker as they say!

This has led me onto the path of Skepticism and critical thinking, something i think i always practiced but had not thought to put a label on.
I just wanted to thank you for your column in the National Post and i look forward to reading your book which i am holding in my hand (ok not literally its beside me) as i type this.

In Among The Truthers, I divide conspiracy theorists into 8 types, according to their psychological motivation in embracing conspiracy theories. The seventh type in my 8-part typology is the “Evangelical Doomsayer”:

Conspiracism is attractive to the Doomsayer because it organizes all of the world’s menacing threats into one monolithic force — allowing him to reconcile the bewildering complexities of our secular world with the good-versus-evil narrative contained in the book of Revelation and other religious texts. The prototypical Doomsayer is an Evangelical Christian who vigilantly scans the news for signs that the world is moving toward some final, apocalyptic confrontation between good and evil. Early American history is littered with Doomsayer cults founded on this practice. But over the course of the twentieth century … the Doomsaying tradition fused with secular New World Order conspiracy theories that predict America’s subjugation by a godless evil empire based in Moscow, London, Turtle Bay, or Tora Bora.

In my book, I cite Megadeth founder and front man Dave Mustaine as the prototypical Evangelical Doomsayer. But I just got a note from someone who might be an even better examplar. His brief note to me summarizes the type better than anyone else I’ve met previous:

I am not a conspirator, but because of my faith in Christ, I’m a truth seeker.  I have info and prophetic words which line up with what’s going on in the world today, what the bible says, which brings me to the truth.  God guides me to revelation on line because he doesn’t want me to be unaware of the times as Jesus is coming soon. I don’t know when but because of the signs all over the face of the earth, the Lord is returning soon for His bride.  The prophetic words I have been receiving from true prophets of God line up with what some of the conspirators are saying which I find worth investigating.  If u would like, I can share other prophetic words with you that I have, because they are fascinating.   Continue reading →

Readers of Among The Truthers will remember Linda Milligan, an Ohio-based researcher whose insights into UFO subculture appear in the book. Following the publication of Among The Truthers, she sent me this interesting email, which I reproduce with her permission …

From: Linda Milligan
To: Jonathan Kay

I just finished your book. I wanted to pass on some ideas from the perspective of a folklorist. By the way, my husband and I had a good laugh when your described the reaction of your daughter’s teacher and your friends to your television appearance. Also, John worried that you might classify him as a “crank” because he’s a computer programmer who is interested in all things Egypt, including the pyramids. Here it goes.

It seems to me [that] conspiracy theory, once it’s established, is a type of legend, a legend being an established narrative that is passed from person to person as if it were “news.” There is no outward proof of it, whatever the narrative might be, but the purported “proof” becomes part of the narrative itself: “I got this from a reliable source, etc.” Belief legends are often controversial and as the top legend scholar in the field, Linda Degh points out, for that reason they take the form of a debate about what is real and true. She says a legend is a debate about belief. The difference I see between a more typical legend and a conspiracy theory is the element of demonization one finds in latter.

I think there are three parts to this. The cause of the formation of the conspiracy theory, the conspiracy theory narrative itself (legend), and the object and cause of demonization.

I’m not well acquainted with the [9/11] Truther legend, so I can only go with what you gave me in your book. But based on that I would say [that architect-turned-Truther] Richard Gage is not engaging in passing along a conspiracy theory narrative; rather, he is reporting information that is the “cause” for the formation of the legend. He claims to be an expert and based on his expertise, the buildings did not collapse as a result of the planes flying into them but by other means. Gage leaves it to others to dream up a narrative that explains the details of what those other means were and how and why the tragedy came to pass. Continue reading →

(Make sure you watch the singing at the end!)

Find out by watching me on his Sun News show here.

In Among The Truthers, I describe “flowchart conspiracism” — America’s signature conspiracist genre — this way: “The imagining of a complex organizational chart linking all of America’s power centers, from media companies to drug makers to the CIA, to one central, all-controlling secular Antichrist.” Turns out there’s a great game out there whose goal is just that.

The three-decade-old game is called Illuminati. Players take on one of the featured main groups — the Bavarian Illuminati, the Discordian Society, the UFOs, The Servants of Cthulhu, the Bermuda Triangle, and the Gnomes of Zürich, etc. You then compete to control dozens of lesser entities, such as the IRS, the post office, and the videogame industry — organizing them into exactly the same sort of flowcharts that I saw on conspiracy-theory web sites when I was investigating my book.

I played the game last night (as the Bavarian Illuminati) at Toronto’s Snakes & Lattes gaming café with my friend Mike (Discordian Society) and his son Finn (Servants of Cthulhu). As the Illuminati, my goal was to maximize total control. In futherance of his esoteric Doscordian objectives, Mike set out to capture groups with a “Weird” orientarion. And Finn’s Servants of Cthulhu? They just wanted to destroy, destroy, destroy.

At the end of my final turn, I had 31 of the 35 control points I needed to win. But then Mike said he had to go home.

How convenient.

A lot of people have asked me how 9/11 conspiracists have responded to my book. The predictable one-word answer is: negatively.

So far as I know, the most ambitious response to my book from the conspiracist community was this jaw-droppingly long online filibuster by Canadian Truther Anthony Hall. And in at least one case, a Truther actually got his review published in a mainstream Canadian newspaper. But for a more representative response, I would direct readers to this article from a web site called 911Grassroots.

In the article, the author, James Hufferd, makes two arguments that appear again and again in Truther reactions to my book: (1) That I don’t deal at length with “evidence” that 9/11 was an inside job (which is true — since the debunking has been done by other authorities, such as Popular Mechanics, to which I point my readers); and (2) That I engage in “name-calling” and ad hominem attacks Truthers.

Except to the extent that I use the term “conspiracy theorist” to describe people who are, well, conspiracy theorists, I reject the second accusation, as well. In fact, I am proud to have made a point of sketching 9/11 conspiracy theorists in the most affectionate possible light. In its review of my book, The Wall Street Journal pointed this out, in fact: “Reporting without mockery, Mr. Kay has a knack for making even the silliest conspiracist sound sympathetic.”

19-minute interview can be found here.

The netwirk’s web site did a follow-up article on the interview for CBC Books.

Click here to watch the show. Michael kindly interviewed me for the whole hour.

Jonathan Kay’s compulsively-readable new book Among The Truthers is as definitive a book on the American conspiracy culture as we are ever going to get … Kay does not ridicule his subjects but analyzes them with affection and precision. In Part II, he creates a Truther taxonomy, identifying the following types: Midlife Crisis Case, Failed Historian, Damaged Survivor, Cosmic Voyager, Clinical Conspiracist, Crank, Evangelical Doomsayer, and Firebrand. Those who familiarize themselves with Kay’s profiles will be more than equipped to recognize which type of conspiracist they are dealing with when they bump into one on Facebook or the comments section of a blog.

Read the rest here.

The Winnipeg Free Press has a very negative review of Among The Truthers in its May 28 edition. Toward the end, the author has this interesting line: “Twenty years from now, there may be some compelling new evidence that proves Kay right on 9/11; or he may be proven a fool, a tool or a dupe.”

Gee, what kind of information could prove me a “dupe” on 9/11? I guess the author could only be referring to evidence of U.S. complicity in the 9/11 attacks.

I’ll have to interview the author — University of Winnipeg professor Donald Benham — for my next book!

Kay spent 2 ½ years interviewing conspiracy theorists, attending their conventions and surfing their websites to write the just-published “Among the Truthers: A Journey Through America’s Growing Conspiracist Underground.”

Kay initially intended to explore the so-called “truther” movement, which makes the slanderous claim the 9/11 attacks were engineered by the U.S. government, and approved by then-President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, so the U.S. could invade Iraq and Afghanistan and curtail civil rights.

But once Kay entered the conspiracy rabbit hole he discovered a world of extreme paranoia — a multitude of conspiracy theories nourished by the Internet and fueled, in part, by anxiety caused by tough economic times.

Read the rest here.

From the NYTimes letters file:

In his review of Jonathan Kay’s “Among the Truthers: A Journey Through America’s Growing Conspiracist Underground” (May 15), Jacob Heil­brunn says, of the beliefs of conspiracy theorists, that “even to dignify it with the word ‘theory’ is probably to grant them more legitimacy than they deserve.”

The pejorative use of the phrase “conspiracy theorists” is nothing more than an attempt to marginalize anyone who disagrees with the “official story” about anything the government or media claim to be true. Yet where would we be without those conspiracy theorists? We would never have known, through the Pentagon Papers, that our government had lied about the reasons for escalating the war in Vietnam; we would never have known the truth about, and the extent of, the Iran-contra affair; and had it not been for a curious night watchman, it almost certainly would have been the conspiracy theorists who eventually unearthed the truth about Watergate.

THE REV. IAN ALTERMAN
New York
The writer is a member of Religious Leaders for 9/11 Truth.

•

To the Editor:

Jacob Heilbrunn, citing Jonathan Kay, calls me and other researchers trying to understand what happened on 9/11 “cranks” propounding baseless beliefs and “often reacting to male midlife crises.” Given that he does not consider our detailed evidence relevant, what are we to make of such accusations?

Kay claims that my research on “the price of individual airline stocks in the run-up to 9/11” is “arcane.” Given the widespread attention to insider trading in the weeks after 9/11 — as well as the scholarly research published in 2006 in The Journal of Business — the word “arcane” cannot apply. Nor is my research confined to that subject: “The Hidden History of 9-11,” which I edited, ranges over much more.

Kay’s verdict is that of a kangaroo court.

PAUL ZAREMBKA
Buffalo
The writer is a professor of economics at the State University of New York, Buffalo.

I feel comfortable predicting that this 11,000-word piece by Anthony J. Hall will be the longest review ever published of Among the Truthers. (It is helpfully broken down into sections like “De-Torquing the Media Spin of Those Who Would Slay the Dragons of Conspiracism, Conspiracists and Conspiracy Theories.”) Incidentally, I have written about Hall before — and let’s just say the rather focused tone of the article is faithful to the personality of the guy who wrote it.

I doubt anyone will read the whole thing — though I do recommend fast-forwarding to the part where the author describes “Kay’s preference for Wendy’s bacon cheeseburgers over the [9/11 Truth] food for thought that the author could have ingested had he opened his mind and come out of his self-imposed isolation.”

For what it’s worth, the rest is here.

The truther conspiracy … involves a cast of thousands: from George W. Bush and Dick Cheney down through much of the CIA and the demolition teams that planted the explosives that brought the twin towers down and the teams of actors who faked the voices of passengers on board the doomed flights, since the hijackings actually never happened. And this is what makes Mr Kay’s book enjoyable. He does a fine job of locating the truther movement in the perennial discontent with authority that pervades American (and wider Western) history, showing the psychological links between truthers and those who in earlier days were preoccupied by secret conspiracies of such diverse foes as masons, illuminati, communists and Jews.

Read more here.

The release of President Barack Obama’s long-form birth certificate may — may — put an end to the Birther movement. But after reading Jonathan Kay’s remarkable and unsettling book, it’s hard to imagine any piece of evidence that would convert the many Truthers who believe that the 9/11 attacks were perpetrated or abetted by elements of our own government. That gets right to the heart of Among the Truthers, one of the most important books published this year.

Read more here (alas — subscription only).

Since the release of Among the Truthers, a lot of Canadians have asked me variations of the same question: “Why are so many of the conspiracy theories you describe in the book about the United States? Aren’t there any good Canadian conspiracy theories?”

The answer, oddly, is no. Almost all of the conspiracy theorists I interviewed – both in Canada and the United States – focus their suspicion on the halls of power in Washington and Wall Street. Conspiracy theories about Canada are extremely rare. In fact, the only “homegrown” conspiracy theories I encountered involved the United States taking over Canada’s sovereignty.

Though I don’t discuss this question in my book, the lack of Canadian conspiracy theories set me wondering as to what it is about Canadian culture that makes us so non-conspiratorial.

The explanation, I think, is multidimensional …

Read the rest here.

Listen to the full audio here.

For the last 17 years, the world has been living on borrowed time. The day of Rapture — when the virtuous fly up to heaven, and the rest of us are marked for annihilation — was supposed to come on September 6, 1994. But then Harold Camping, the popular California-based Christian radio broadcaster who’d made the prediction, realized he’d gotten his numbers wrong.

“I had not gone through the book of Jeremiah, which is a big book in the Bible that has a whole lot to say about the whole matter of the end of the world,” he recently told an interviewer. Thanks to Jeremiah, he now is quite certain that the Rapture will come tomorrow, May 21, 2011 (the date, Camping, calculates, corresponds to the 7,000th anniversary of Noah’s flood). We’ll be victimized by a monstrous earthquake that starts on the Pacific rim and moves east systematically, hour by hour, through the time zones, at exactly 6pm.

Like his many followers, Camping is quite certain that he will be in Heaven by next week — and regards it as an offence against God to even consider the possibility of seeing the dawn break on May 22: “It is going to happen. There is no plan B.”

Read more here.

I had forgotten about this. In retrospect, I guess I owe thanks to Michele Landsberg for setting the stage — eight years ago — for the book I would eventually publish in 2011.

Michele Landsberg loses it
National Post
Tue May 13  2003
Page: A21
Section: Editorials

As journalists, we sometimes find our e-mail inboxes besieged by conspiracy theorists who accuse us of willfully ignoring some sinister cabal — be it the Jews, the CIA, Big Oil or the Knights Templar. The best response, we’ve learned, is to tap the delete button.

But what do you do when the rant can’t be deleted — because the author is a columnist for a major newspaper?

We refer here to Toronto Star writer Michele Landsberg. On Sunday, Ms. Landsberg dedicated her column to Barrie Zwicker, a television journalist who peddles an obscure video called The Great Deception. Mr. Zwicker’s basic thesis is that the 9/11 terrorist attacks were likely a conspiracy involving “elements within the top U.S. military, intelligence and political leadership,” that the war on terrorism is a “Big Lie” and that George W. Bush’s “implausible official version” of 9/11 was really just a pretext to “promot[e] perpetual global war in the service of resource looting.”

The “evidence” Mr. Zwicker presents in support of his thesis is a mish-mash of odd details and darkly phrased questions — none of them unfamiliar to anyone who followed the rise and fall of such conspiracy theories in late 2001. Whatever currency these theories once enjoyed was blown away last year by a stream of confessions and operational disclosures from captured al-Qaeda commanders. Yet Ms. Landsberg apparently came away from The Great Deception a believer. Upon watching the video, she says, “a frightening chill came over me.” She concludes: “If you call [Mr. Zwicker] a conspiracy theorist, call me one, too, because I agree with Zwicker when he says, ‘I don’t know exactly what happened, but something smells very fishy.’ ”

What is unintentionally comical about Ms. Landsberg’s piece is the way she presents herself and Mr. Zwicker as a pair of heroic free thinkers who “challenge conventional wisdom” and stand up to the “rank-smelling” censors and lackeys who guard the path to truth. The duo ask “embarrassingly uncool” questions, she says, which “99% of Canadian journalists have not dared or deigned to ask.”

The truth, of course, is rather less dramatic. While 99 out of every 100 Canadian journalists do indeed find Ms. Landsberg’s nonsense “embarrassing,” it is not for any lack of courage. Rather, they recognize that Mr. Zwicker’s “Big Lie” theory is an eccentric crock. The reason they haven’t reported on it is because they’re good reporters.

We will not try to argue down Ms. Landsberg: Clearly, her logic circuits have been blown by a blinding hatred of the United States. And just as it is impossible to prove to a true conspiracy theorist that the Holocaust happened or that the moon landing wasn’t faked, no one will ever be able to definitively “prove” 9/11 to those who see the hand of the CIA behind every evil. But surely, Ms. Landsberg’s editors at the Star were in a position to exercise better judgment. Poisonous delusions such as these do not belong in a mainstream newspaper.

I just received my copy of [Among The Truthers] and am about half way through. It’s a very good piece of journalism. No footnotes, but he does draw on relevant academic studies such as the work of Michael Barkun and Kathryn Olmsted.

The ‘truthers’ of the title are emblematic of the wide range of conspiracy theories discussed/acknowledged; in the first half of the book he discusses Birthers and WND (in some depth), Tea Partiers (not labelling all of them as CTs, but showing how they connect to the radical right fringe a la the Birch Society of yore), and given a fairly standard account of the origins of conspiracism and populism. I.e. Robison, Barruel, anti-Masonry, the Protocols, turn-of-the-century populism etc. But he’s also mentioned HAARP, anti-fluoridisation, written pen-portraits of Alex Jones, Webster Tarpley, and various other assorted nuts.

Some of the insights will be *very* familiar to JREFers as they’re standard observations. Some points might be disputable – eg his claim that Truthers are nonviolent.

Read more here.

I’ll be appearing on Chris Mooney’s next Point of Inquiry podcast, airing on Monday, May 23. We taped it this week and — if I do say — it was a great discussion between two fellow rationalist travelers. Details here.

• Paranoid Nation: How Conspiracy Theories Are Destroying America By Julian Brookes

  Barack Obama wasn’t born in the U.S. (And even if he was, no matter: He’s still fixing to impose socialist tyranny on America); Osama bin Laden is still alive, or died long ago. 9/11 was an inside job. In case you hadn’t noticed, conspiracy theories are big these days. More »

• Book Excerpt: The Preface of Among the Truthers

  An excerpt from Among the Truthers: A Journey Through America’s Growing Conspiracist Underground by Jonathan Kay. More »

• Q&A: Jonathan Kay on Our Vast Conspiracist Subculture
  By Julian Brookes

• Photo gallery: The 8 kinds of conspiracy theorist

Full list is here.

My interviewer was Jospeph Planta. Smart guy. Full audio can be found here.

“Jonathan Kay’s Among the Truthers is getting the most favored royal treatment in the press” — and this guy isn’t happy about it.

More unhappiness from the same author here.

“[C]onspiracy theories act as a bridge between…ideology and…reality. [I]n the case of 9/11 you had a lot of left-wing conspiracy theorists who see America as the root of all evil, and when they saw America attacked…they needed some fantasy that would show how this act was actually created by U.S. evil,” says Jonathan Kay, author of Among the Truthers: A Journey Through America’s Growing Conspiracist Underground.

Listen to the interview here.

Of all the truther headliners I’ve seen, the very best is Richard Gage, a balding, mild-mannered, middle-aged architect who heads up a California-based group called Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth. I’ve heard Gage speak three times in three different cities. At each event, the response was rapturous. At a 2009 lecture in Montreal, his crowd sat mesmerized as he spoke for three straight hours—on a night when the Montreal Canadiens were contesting a playoff game, no less. At a speech in New York City a few months later, the audience burst into a spontaneous chant of “Ri-chard! Richard!” Blushing and grinning like an earnest, overgrown schoolboy, Gage blurted out: “Your enthusiasm knocks my socks off!”

His singular focus—laboriously examined in a 600-slide PowerPoint presentation he trots out at every opportunity—is the precise sequence of events leading to the collapse of the World Trade Center buildings. Avoiding speculation on the Pentagon attacks and the machinations of the Bush White House is critical to the mission of Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth, he says. “We’re building and technical professionals,” Gage tells his audiences. “We’re not conspiracy theorists.” Gage inevitably elicits emotional gasps and shouts with his slide show. In Montreal, a couple sitting behind me seemed particularly moved. “How can those murderers sleep at night after what they’ve done?” one exclaimed. (She wasn’t talking about al-Qaeda.) Even my own guest, a conservative-minded 65-year-old woman, seemed transfixed, falling silent at points where I expected she’d be chortling and rolling her eyes.

Read more here.

Kay’s tactic here is the same one used by Michael Shermer of the seriously missnamed Skeptics Society, which is, as the subtitle indicates, to mix up the 9/11 truth movement with The Protocols of Zion, holocaust denial, birtherism, moon hoaxism, etc., into one big wacky ball of racism and lunacy. And his method is as dishonest as Shermer’s as well. Thus, in his interviews, he emphasizes figures he can most easily characterize as charming but quaint, such as Ken Jenkins, a “Bay area flower child” who “embodies the sixties soul of the 9/11 truth movement’s older members.” Or, where he does speak with Truthers who are more immediately credible, he makes short work of their credentials before reverting to the book’s default mode — a sort of bland superciliousness. Thus Barrie Zwicker, a journalist of longer standing and quite a bit more distinction than Kay, becomes “an amiable crank,” of interest mostly because he insisted on conducting his own counter-interview when they met, complete with “a chess clock to regulate our usage of time.” And David Ray Griffin, who has spent not two but eight years studying his subject and published 11 books about it, is also, simply, a “crank.”

Read more here.

p.s. Moher is completely correct that I misidentified him as a poet. I regret the error, and will correct it in any future editions.

“Among the Truthers” is a remarkable book, not least because its author, Jonathan Kay, appears to have emerged with his sanity intact after immersing himself for several years in the wilder precincts of conspiracy theories about everything from President Obama’s birthplace to 9/11 to vaccines. Like a modern-day Gulliver, he has traveled widely and conducted numerous interviews to map what seems like every nook and cranny of the conspiracist universe. Yet Kay, an editor and columnist at the conservative Canadian newspaper The National Post, has not written a Swiftian satire on the foibles of humanity. Rather, he sounds alarms about what he depicts as a mounting paranoia inspired by an invisible and nefarious oligarchy.

Read more here.