Among the Truthers Read Free Page A

tiny grain of truth at the core of popular conspiracy theories, even in the case of concocted ones. Or at least some vexing question. How did Adolf Hitler exterminate European Jewry without the Allies finding out about it earlier? How was Lee Harvey Oswald able to shoot JFK twice within such a short period of time? Why does the U.S. flag appear to flutter in the moon-landing footage? In most cases, experts can provide persuasive answers. But sometimes, the truth is that we simply don’t know. The world is a complicated place, and some aspects of even the most heavily scrutinized historical events always will remain fissures in society’s intellectual foundations. In normal times, those fissures remain small and inconsequential—fodder for campus crackpots and late night AM call-in shows, perhaps, but nothing more. But in a society whose public intellectual foundations have been compromised over decades, those cracks will spread until the entire edifice is threatened.
    That is what has happened to the United States, a place where millions of American “Birthers” accuse their president of being a foreign-born illegal alien. Other right-wing conspiracists, including no less a political celebrity than the Republicans’ 2008 vice-presidential candidate, accused Barack Obama of creating “death panels” that would send the old and crippled to early graves. In bookstores and movie theaters, Dan Brown became a cultural force of nature by peddling discredited fantasies about Christian conspiracies, freemasonry, and secret societies.
    Most infamously, there is the 9/11 “Truth movement,” whose members have concluded that the September 11 attacks were actually part of an “inside job” hatched by ultra-hawkish elements within the U.S. government in order to secure a pretext for war abroad and draconian repression at home. In the Truther vision of America, our elected government is nothing but a smokescreen for Deep State actors—arms dealers, oil companies, neoconservative ideologues, Strangelovian Pentagon warmongers—who pull our elected politicians’ puppet strings, and control our society at all levels through bribery, murder, and extortion.
    Despite this otherworldly premise, the 9/11 Truth movement has become a mass phenomenon in the last ten years, spawning best-selling books, conferences, a pseudo-academic journal, and dozens of heavily surfed websites. A 2006 Scripps Howard poll of over one thousand U.S. citizens found that 36 percent of Americans believe it was either “somewhat likely” or “very likely” that “federal officials either participated in the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, or took no action to stop them.” About one-sixth of the respondents also agreed it was at least “somewhat likely” that “the collapse of the twin towers in New York was aided by explosives secretly planted in the two buildings.”
    For some Truthers, including many of those I’ve interviewed for this book, the idea that elements within the Bush administration used self-inflicted mass murder as a launching pad for geopolitical adventurism has become a full-time, all-consuming obsession. They include white-collar professionals like Richard Gage, a mild-mannered California architect who spent twenty years designing office buildings and strip malls before giving up everything—his wife, his home, his job—so he could travel the world preaching the gospel that the Twin Towers were felled by controlled demolition; and Steven Jones, a famous Brigham Young University physicist renowned for his work with cold fusion back in the 1980s, who then went on to lead a group called Scholars for 9/11 Truth and Justice. Actor Daniel Sunjata is a Truther (and even was permitted to deliver an in-character Truther monologue during a 2009 episode of the FX Network television drama Rescue Me ). So is former pro wrestler and Minnesota