Among the Truthers Read Free Page B

governor Jesse Ventura, who went on to host a TV series dedicated to conspiracy theories; Charlie Sheen, who in September 2009 published a lengthy Truther-themed pseudo-interview with Barack Obama; Van Jones, the presidential advisor who was forced to quit his post after it was disclosed that he’d signed a petition seeking a new investigation into 9/11; Jared Loughner, the gunman who shot Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords; as well as Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez. In November 2010, as I was preparing final edits for this book, FOX News Channel analyst (and former New Jersey Superior Court judge) Andrew Napolitano told his audience: “Twenty years from now, people will look at 9-11 the way we look at the assassination of JFK today. It couldn’t possibly have been done the way the government told us.”
    Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is a Truther, too, naturally. In September 2010, he told the United Nations General Assembly that the 9/11 attacks were staged by elements within the U.S. government in order “to reverse the declining American economy and . . . save the Zionist regime.” Just a few days later, he visited Yale University, where he lectured a graduate seminar on “U.S.-Iranian Diplomacy.” Hillary Mann Leverett, the senior research fellow who organized the event, claimed Ahmadinejad’s smooth performance at Yale demonstrated that he is “not a crazy, irrational leader.” On the modern American campus, accepting the truth of 9/11 (not to mention the Holocaust—which Ahmadinejad also doubts) apparently is no longer a prerequisite for “rational” thinkers.
    Despite all this, the 9/11 Truth movement mostly has been ignored by the mainstream media. In some scattered instances, Truthers have appeared on television (usually, on community access), and a few popular left-wing columnists (such as Robert Fisk of Britain’s Independent ) have expressed skepticism of the conventionally accepted account of the 9/11 attacks. But in general, mainstream authors and publishing houses have shunned Truthers. To provide them with any sort of media platform, the theory goes, is to “dignify” their position as respectable—the “other side” in a debate we should not even be having.
    But having spent the last three years interviewing Truthers, reading their literature, attending their events, and surfing their discussion forums, I’ve come to a different conclusion. The Truther phenomenon—like the broader intellectual trend it epitomizes—is simply too important to ignore. Truther theories may be nonsense, but the disturbing habits of mind underlying them—a nihilistic distrust in government, total alienation from conventional politics, a need to reduce the world’s complexity to good-versus-evil fables, the melding of secular politics with apocalyptic End-Is-Nigh religiosity, and a rejection of the basic tools of logic and rational discourse—have become threats all across our intellectual landscape. Moreover, journalists’ refusal to engage intellectually with conspiracy theorists only serves to justify their claim—made on both sides of the political spectrum—that the mainstream media is nothing more than a trade shop for establishment propagandists.
    You can’t defeat the Enlightenment’s enemies unless you understand them. And that is the project I ask my readers to embark on as they read this book. Those of us who continue to adhere to the rationalist tradition must commit to its defense, as though the year were 1755 and not 2011. For if the Great Lisbon Earthquake can be said to have inaugurated the Age of Reason, 9/11 and its consequences may yet prove to mark its end.

Introduction: Stumbling on the Truthers
    What is madness? To have erroneous perceptions and to reason correctly from them.
    â€”Voltaire
    D avid Rockefeller owns several homes. So it is hard to say whether he was at his East