How Exactly Did We Get Involved in This?

Some Canadian has made a series of bizarre videos interviewing Jonathan Kay on his recent Among the Truthers book. This in and of itself is not remarkable, although Kay seems amazingly calm sitting there listening to this idiot, but the part that really cracked me up is the video mentions us, not once, but twice, even though we never came up in the actual interview, including a caption reading, "Screw Loose Change!... Are you for real?"

We must be doing something right if the nutters are seeing us in their sleep.

Among the Truthers: The Review

We have been talking about Jonathan Kay's new book Among the Truthers for some time now, but I have finally had the time to read it all. That doesn't stop the Truthers from reviewing it of course, all of whom have universally denounced it mostly without showing any indication that they actually read it.

Now I will be the first to admit that I am biased, since I was interviewed for the book, as well as quoted in it, and the book cites us as one of the major debunking resources, but then again I can also say that I know quite a bit about the subject.

Now first of all, what is this book about? As Truthers are pointing out, it is not a debunking book. They of course claim that Kay refuses to look at the evidence, while if you read the book Kay makes clear that he did look at the evidence, but found it wanting. Kay explains rather, that 1. he really didn't have much new to add to the debunking argument (he cites several books and Internet sites, including this one, as resources for this), and 2. his editor didn't think that there was a market for such a book, because the Truthers would not believe anything he put and everyone else didn't need to be told. I agree to a certain extent, although we have done a lot of debunking over the last 5 years, I have gotten to the point where about all I discuss is the psychology of this movement, because really, is much really added by our pointing out for the 15th time that the hijackers actually were on the flight manifests?

So Kay gets mainly into the composition of the Truthers and other similar conspiracy theorists and asks why they believe what they do. In this he does a pretty good job. The Truthers of course condemn him for ad hominem attacks, but in reality, he is actually rather kind to them, much kinder than I would be, although he obviously does not agree with their viewpoint. Despite this though he does primarily depict them as earnest and intelligent people, who just, for various reasons come to the wrong conclusions. Kay obviously did his research and quotes from interviews from various prominent characters in the Truther movement, and does provide some insight which a mere blogger cannot. His depictions of Michael Ruppert, Richard Gage and Steven Jones especially are among the most interesting.

The weakest part of the book, however, is the last section where he discusses the role of academics and then how we should address conspiracy theories in the educational system. It just seemed rather tacked on and not tightly connected to the rest. On the whole though, if you are interested in conspiracy theorists as a social phenomenon, and if you are reading this blog I assume you are, then it is a book well worth reading.

Up Canada Way

Joshua Blakeney, the dimwitted British Truther studying in Canada who claimed that Israel's fingerprints were all over 9-11 and then tried to weasel out by saying that just because their fingerprints were all over 9-11 didn't necessarily mean they were guilty, has an interesting Facebook buddy:

Joshua Blackeney (sic), a well-known Canadian 9/11 nut case, is connected through Facebook to Bradley Smith, the 'founder' of the Committee for Open Debate and the Holocaust. Yes, it is a Holocaust Denial kind of thing.

Blakeney posted on Veterans Today, his professor Anthony J. Hall's review of Kay's Among the Truthers.

This development helps block wider appreciation in Europe and North America of the historic and continuing importance of Islam in the genesis of Western civilization, global civilization. The sacred myth of 9/11 helps renew the old imperial ploy of divide and conquer. By highlighting issues of religion and ethnicity as the primary cause of, and justification for, global conflict, the sacred myth of 9/11 diverts attention away from the huge and growing gap between rich and poor.

As you may recall, it was Kevin Barrett who claimed the Holocaust itself was a "sacred" "myth":

I would still have to characterize the Holocaust as it is taught in the US as a hideously destructive myth. (A myth is a sacred, worldview-inaugurating story its users believe to be true.)

Hall's review is extremely long, and largely boils down to griping that Kay doesn't engage in a point-by-point debunking of 9-11 nuttery. Of course, point-by-point debunking doesn't impress the Truthers anyway, as can be seen by their reaction to the Popular Mechanics book.

By the way, Veterans Today itself was recently exposed as something of a bogus operation. But why would Blakeney post Hall's review there? Well, here's a pretty good clue:

What will you find on "Veterans Today"? Well, everything has pretty much one focus:

BLAME ISRAEL FOR EVERYTHING

Revere (a Truther moron himself) goes on to show some of the nuttier stuff about Israel at Veterans Today, some of which James has highlighted in previous posts. And if you're looking for Holocaust Denial over there, you won't be disappointed. Among their columnists (aside from Blakeney) is Dr Ingrid Rimland Zundel. Yep, that Zundel:

Years before I met and married Ernst Zundel and, thus, became a Holocaust Denier – because this malady, Denial-of-the-Holocaust, can be infectious, in case you didn’t know! – I made my living as a kiddie shrink: in academic parlance, an Educational Psychologist.

Once Ernst and I became a team, he asked me to do a monograph on “The Impact of Words on the Mind,” by which he hoped to neutralize the virulent character assassination of an entire people, the Germans who fought World War II, unleashed on them sans mercy by another set of bipeds, the Victims of the Holocaust. The latter try to run down every last “War Criminal” on earth. The former seem without defenses.

I'm not saying that Blakeney himself is a Holocaust Denier. But he sure has a lot of connections to them.

Kay On Gage

A brief extract from Among the Truthers:

Gage will admit that he’s paid a price. Friends who failed to embrace his missionary zeal have drifted away. So has his wife, who he said had difficulty accepting his “dark” vision. Gage now lives by himself in a home office near Berkeley, paying his bills with the modest amounts he earns through donations. Yet when Gage discusses all this, he seems curiously upbeat—almost euphoric—like a Benedictine monk who’s happily renounced the material encumbrances of secular life. Although he doesn’t talk much about his world before 9/11 Truth, he clearly remembers it as empty and unsatisfying.

“I would rather die speaking the truth than live in a police state, which is what 9/11 set the groundwork for,” he tells me in a final, slightly manic flourish. “I can’t have my son—or grandchildren—ask me, ‘What did you do to stop it?’—and I say, ‘I tried to talk to some architects but they wouldn’t listen.’

As a reminder, those "modest amounts" equaled $75,000 in 2009; I'm still waiting for Guidestar to post the 2010 figures.

The part that I still have difficulty believing is this:

But Gage arrived in a calm, friendly mood. After buying himself a soy latte, he sat with me on a bench outside the café for two hours, patiently describing his transformation from workaday commercial architect to 9/11 Truth evangelist. It was in March 2006 that his life changed, Gage tells me. He was in his car just after lunch, fighting traffic en route to a construction meeting. Bored, he flipped on KPFA 94.1 FM, a listener-supported station out of Berkeley—“to hear what the communists were talking about.”

Up to that point in life, Gage recalls, he’d been just your average workaday architect, with a wife, child, and a strong Republican voting record. “I believed strongly in America,” he tells me. “I believed everything was okay. When Colin Powell was giving his Iraq evidence at the United Nations [in March 2003], I was cheering him on. I wanted us to go to war in Iraq. I wanted to find the WMD. I was completely on board. I was the poster child for George W. Bush’s foreign policy.”

It's certainly not unheard of for people to listen to the other side on the radio; I used to listen to Air America. What is unusual is this:

The voice he heard on KPFA’s airwaves belonged to David Ray Griffin, a retired Claremont School of Theology professor who’s since become a full-time 9/11 Truth activist. “Griffin was logical and methodical—almost grandfatherly,” Gage remembers. “He was talking about the 118 [World Trade Center] first-responders—information that had just come out in 2005—who said they’d heard explosions and flashes of light, beams dripping with molten metal, all amid the collapse of 80,000 tons of structural steel. It hit me like a two-by-four. How come I’d never heard of any of this? I was shocked. I had to pull my car off the road to absorb it all. I knew I’d be late for the meeting. But I didn’t care.”

Most liberals, if they listened to Rush Limbaugh, would not be pulling off the road to absorb it all and saying, "You know, he's right!" Ditto with conservatives taking in Ed Schultz.

And when Gage recently hired a publicist for his group, whom did he choose? Ilene Proctor, who bills herself as "The Public Relations Princess of the Political Left".

How America became the land of Truthers, Triggers, Birthers, and Dan Brown fans

Slate previews Jonathan Kay's upcoming book Among the Truthers. Looking forward to reading it.

It's a familiar rationale for conspiracy theorists: They investigate as much in sorrow as in anger. They are always just one confession away from the truth. This kind of logic is much more understandable, if no more sensible, after reading Among the Truthers: A Journey Through America's Growing Conspiracist Underground, a smart and serious new book by Canadian journalist Jonathan Kay. His book shows why Americans are becoming so willing to believe lurid fantasies about the government or politicians they don't like or vaccines or the theory that the federal government was behind the attacks of 9/11 (these believers are the "truthers" of his title). And you realize that the world of conspiracies is only going to get larger.

There are basically two reasons for this, and they're entwined. The media, as Kay points out, is more fragmented than ever. Information is easier to come across, and bogus information has a way of jumping to the top of Google's search pages. That fragmentation is happening at a time of intense partisan anger and economic angst.