Among the Truthers Read Free

news media as lackeys to society’s wealthy stakeholders. Even if the two angry poles of the political spectrum agree on nothing else, their attitude toward the media has fused together in a common posture of aggressive skepticism. Moreover, the media’s failure to take this two-pronged assault seriously enough to respond to its major assertions—and more important, perhaps, its refusal to acknowledge the grain of truth in these critiques—has further compromised its authority as an arbiter of what is “true” or “real” in American life.
    In sum, the media have ceased to be the source of an accepted common vision of events and have come to be seen instead as interested partisans manipulating public perceptions for hidden commercial or ideological ends. Even if a majority of Americans do not actually share these suspicions, the generalized mistrust of the “official version” of events has made many of them less critical of formerly outlandish explanations, which are now entertained as equally plausible “alternative narratives.”
    The result of all this is nothing less than a countercultural rift in the fabric of consensual American reality, a gaping cognitive hole into which has leaped a wide range of political paranoiacs previously consigned to the lunatic fringe—Larouchites, UFO nuts, libertarian survivalists, Holocaust deniers, and a thousand other groups besides. Even conspiracy theories that were discredited generations ago suddenly have sprung back to life, as if animated by electroshock. Explaining his decision to run a 1999 cover story questioning “who in fact was the bard, the usual suspect from Stratford, or Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford?” Harper ’ s then-editor Lewis H. Lapham—the very caricature of a coastal, salon-dwelling sophisticate, which is to say, someone who should know better—recalled that his interest in the controversy was first piqued in 1972, “not a year conducive to belief in the masterpieces of the official doctrine.” Such talk is eerily reminiscent of Orwell’s reflections on the nature of totalitarian propaganda.
    Conspiracy theories, the subject of this book, are both a leading cause and a symptom of this intellectual and civic crisis. When a critical mass of educated people in a society lose their grip on the real world—when they claim that George W. Bush is a follower of Nazi ideology, that Barack Obama is a Muslim secretly plotting to impose Sharia law on America, that the United States government is controlled by Israel, or that FEMA is preparing to imprison political dissidents in preparation for a totalitarian New World Order—it is a signal that the ordinary rules of rational intellectual inquiry are now treated as optional. It is not unusual for intellectuals and politicians to reject their opponents’ arguments. But it is the mark of an intellectually pathologized society that intellectuals and politicians will reject their opponents’ realities .
    As I argue in Chapter 5—my field guide to the different breeds of conspiracy theorist—people come to their paranoias for all sorts of complicated reasons. Some of the figures profiled within this book are Marxists. Others are anti-Semites, or radical libertarians, or religious fantasists. Some defy ideological categorization. But they are all bound together by one increasingly common trait: They have spun out of rationality’s ever-weakening gravitational pull, and into mutually impenetrable Manichean fantasy universes of their own construction. Much of this book is devoted to the task of exploring those fantasy universes and delving into the minds of those who create them—an inquiry that is a critical first step in defending the rationalist tradition.
    It is important to concede that some conspiracies are very real. Watergate was no myth. Neither was Iran-Contra, or the Teapot Dome scandal. There is always a