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sabotabbyWere I a very different sort of person, I would see a nefarious connection between the tenth anniversary of the September 11, 2001, attacks and the fact that my hold on Jonathan Kay's Among the Truthers: a journey into the growing conspiracist underground of 9/11 Truthers, Armageddonites, Vaccine Hysterics, Hollywood Know-Nothings and Internet Addicts came through at just the right time to allow me to finish it on September 9th. Of course, I'm not remotely that sort of person, but the pattern-recognition part of my brain still twigged a little when I realized the coincidence.
I confess that I am obsessed with conspiracy theories and the conspiratorial mindset. I blame X-Files in the 90s for both causing my interest in conspiracy theories and inoculating me from believing in them. Kay is similarly obsessed, though for different reasons—as he admits in the book, he actually shares many traits with people who believe in conspiracy theories. In fact, the book contains a conspiracy theory as elaborate and bizarre as any depicted in Loose Change or Zeitgeist, one that draws mindboggling links between Das Kapital, Protocols of the Elders of Zion, Orientalism, and modern conspiracy movements.
Yep, there's an agenda at work here. Kay is a writer and editor with the National Post, and he doesn't so much want to debunk Trutherism as use it as a tool to slam the typical bugbears: Marxism, social justice and anti-war movements, atheism, and Kant's supposed "moral relativism." (It's always Kant's fault.)
I'm not going to say you shouldn't read it or that it was a complete waste of time; there is certainly good information in the book, and he's correct in stating that there are more 9/11 conspiracy theories out there than there are books debunking them. It's important to understand the conspiratorial mindset and to critically examine the claims of Truthers, especially given what I've said repeatedly about their infiltration into legitimate social and political movements. It's not a harmless crank theory. He does interview actual Truthers and present case studies, and that stuff is valuable to know about. I just wish this book had been written by someone who wasn't as much of a crank as his subjects.
First off, the title is misleading. Kay spends about half the book talking about Truthers and very little of it talking about other modern conspiracies, like the anti-vaccine people or the Birthers. This is because he deliberately wants to associate Trutherism with the left. His main target is not the Truthers; he's almost affectionate towards them. He spends more time talking about Toronto Palestine solidarity activism at the end of the book than he does talking about anti-vaccine hysterics. This is unfortunate, not just because I don't agree with what a writer for a far-right publication thinks of a movement I belong to, but also because it means the book fails to answer some of my burning questions. For example, he talks a lot about how belief in one conspiracy makes a person more likely to believe other conspiracies. What does this mean when Truthers largely identify as left-wing and Birthers identify exclusively as right/libertarian? Is there overlap between these two groups? What about the 90s militia movement?
Then there's the preface and the conclusion, where Kay spends an inordinate amount of time talking about how Voltaire hated atheists and how Marxism is basically a conspiracy theory. Even if you're not an atheist or a Marxist, this is pushing it. So apparently the Enlightenment was a good thing for the most part, except that it did away with religion as a powerful, unifying social institution. Being pattern-recognizing creatures, we naturally floundered for something to explain why bad things happen, and in the absence of God, many of us see the invisible hand of intention where none exists. That's not a wrong theory, but it leads to a very wrong conclusion at the end, where Kay argues that what we need is for religion to return as a unifying force. Then there's the whole idea of Marxism being a conspiracy theory, which leads to Marxists becoming conspiracy theorists, though out of all of the conspiracy theorists he profiles, very few ever identified as Marxists. Nevertheless, "Marxism is, in its broad contours, itself a form of conspiracy theory that pits evil industrialists against the common workingman."
Kay posits a "flowchart" theory of conspiracism, where a conspiracy-minded individual draws linkages between different people and institutions, and reaches the conclusion that they're all in it together. Of course, this is exactly what Kay does in his book. Because some Truthers used to be anti-war activists and others still are, and anti-war activism is linked to Palestine solidarity activism, Palestine solidarity activists believe in conspiracy theories. And everyone is an anti-Semite. Obviously. Also, identity politics is a conspiracy theory. He talks about identity politics a lot.
The other grudge Kay has is against the internet. He argues that rather than democratizing information, it leads to intellectual Balkanization and promotes misinformation. I find this interesting because he writes for the National Post. Ahem. He actually points this out as well but claims that the internet is worse for whatever reason.
At some point I gave up being annoyed with the underlying problematic nature of Kay's focus and analysis, and I just started tearing up bits of paper and bookmarking the parts that I strongly objected to.
You can tell a lot about a writer's biases by his language. When talking about the history of American conspiracism, Kay correctly points out that the social changes of the 70s had a traumatizing influence on American conservatives and launched Reagan into power. But the terminology he chooses to use in an unqualified way is telling: He refers to "on-demand abortion" and "forced busing," without scare quotes that distance himself from the politics that use these terms to manipulate opinion. He puts "neoconservativism" in scare quotes, though, and refers to "Chomskyites," towards the end.
He loses any alert modern reader early on, in a discussion of the Bilderberg Group. Now, Bilderberg conspiracism is more understandable than most conspiracy theories, even if it's a little hysterical—no one disputes the fact that rich, powerful, nasty people meet annually to talk. Secretly. Kay doesn't dispute it either; he just doesn't think that they're planning the New World Order. That's fine. His source for disputing Bilderberg conspiracism, however? Is Conrad Black. Just a suggestion: If you are attempting to debunk a conspiracy about rich and powerful men doing illegal things, it is probably not the greatest idea to counter with information gleaned from a rich and powerful man who was convicted of doing illegal things. Who is also your friend and colleague. Oy.
Then there's the fact that when he does talk about Birtherism, he's much more sympathetic than he is to the much more evidence-based claims of, say, social justice movements. Kay points out that it's true that Obama "took cocaine and flirted with extreme leftist ideologies...[M]ade his bed with a menagerie that included a crook, a former terrorist, and a black-power preacher who spouted toxic anti-American conspiracy theories [...] was raised as a Muslim in Indonesia..." and so on. Kay acknowledges that these are not "damming" (sic) facts but that they are "unprecedented." Accordingly, Birtherism can be blamed, not on the fact that the Birthers are racist, but on Obama's supposed links to left conspiracies and on a "liberal" media that doesn't attack Obama enough. He refers to David Solway, a Birther, as "genuinely insightful," for passages like:
Kay has a bone to pick with identity politics and specifically with Black people. He claims that Afrocentrism isn't "a conspiracy theory per se" and then goes on to describe how it is, and is also anti-Semitic, and Black bookstores sell Protocols of the Elders of Zion (they do?! Not the ones I go to!) but white people avert their eyes because we feel guilty about America's treatment of Blacks. By the way, to Kay, actual racism is a thing of the past, with the exception of anti-Semitism among Arabs and Black people.
Like most on the right, Kay has a problem with academia (many of his subjects are liberal arts professors, whom he singles out as particularly vulnerable to conspiratorial thinking because their jobs require twisting reality in inventive ways) and postmodernism. He indirectly condemns Jaques Derrida as an anti-Semite because of his association with Paul de Man. This seems irrelevant to me unless one's goal is not so much understanding conspiracism as it is to attack postmodernism and postcolonial theory as sketchy and anti-Semitic. I'm a fair woman; I don't expect Kay to really understand what Derrida was writing about, since even postmodernists don't understand Derrida, but if you don't understand him, why bring him up?
Unless—and he does this almost immediately after bringing up Derrida—your flowchart conspiracy involves the crucial link of postmodernism and "identity politics." Among Kay's real targets, as I've said, are social justice movements. In one of the most bizarre attacks, after defining identity politics as "the reconstruction (and in some cases, the wholesale invention) of history according to the viewpoint of women, blacks, gays, and other minorities—a project that replaced the historian's once-unquestioned goal of objective truth with an explicitly political, Marxist-leaning agenda aimed at empowerment and solidarity building," he launches into the following truly bizarre claim:
Really? Really? This is what he thinks leftists think? Because I thought we believed that the technologically superior European colonists committed genocide against an ill-prepared indigenous population—because that's what actually happened. I don't even know where he's getting this crap.
And then there's the bit where he infiltrates a workshop at the Toronto Women's Bookstore, a place where I have spent a great deal of time. I won't quote it because there are almost more scare quotes than words, and he takes issue with the idea that there's such a thing as privilege or oppression, and generally whines that he's being oppressed as a straight white man by all of these grad student types.
You might also be surprised that there's a direct line drawn from Protocols to the National Post's favourite target in the whole wide world, Queers Against Israeli Apartheid. Did you know, for example, when peace activists march in anti-war rallies, they "chant for Jewish blood in Arabic"? Because I have been to said rallies and no, this is not a thing that happens. I am pretty sure that Kay doesn't speak Arabic anyway.
Ultimately, Kay claims that his issue with conspiracism is that it's anti-Enlightenment, it goes against rationalism, and so on. But his solution (after the obligatory "more education" proposal, which he himself admits is kind of useless) is a return to a different sort of pattern-forming: institutional religion. "It is important," Kay argues, "to remember that the Enlightenment did not spell the end of serious Christian theology—and most of its giants likely would have been appalled by the exercise of their legacy to promote a Godless society."
That's the book in a nutshell—we have abandoned traditional churches and hierarchies, and the result is Loose Change. It's crazy. It's bollocks.
Like the conspiracies Kay tries to debunk (and inadvertently bolsters in some cases), there's a grain of truth and some solid research in this book. But like Cynthia McKinney, whose very legitimate criticism of America's wars and Israel's policies towards the Palestinians was derailed by her association with the 9/11 Truther movement, one can't take anything Kay says in the book seriously because he says so many other things that are demonstrably false. It would have been much more valuable to strip out many of the chapters on "conspiracy theories" like identity politics, instead of writing a book, produce a series of case studies about Truthers, Birthers, and anti-vaccine fanatics. Those interviews are actually good and useful. I felt, reading this, that much of the supposed analysis and historical background was just padding, or perhaps notes for a book that Kay really wanted to write about how awful social justice activists are. When he sticks to interviewing Truthers, he's not so bad.
Accordingly, I'm still waiting for a good analysis of Truther conspiracies. Any recommendations?
I confess that I am obsessed with conspiracy theories and the conspiratorial mindset. I blame X-Files in the 90s for both causing my interest in conspiracy theories and inoculating me from believing in them. Kay is similarly obsessed, though for different reasons—as he admits in the book, he actually shares many traits with people who believe in conspiracy theories. In fact, the book contains a conspiracy theory as elaborate and bizarre as any depicted in Loose Change or Zeitgeist, one that draws mindboggling links between Das Kapital, Protocols of the Elders of Zion, Orientalism, and modern conspiracy movements.
Yep, there's an agenda at work here. Kay is a writer and editor with the National Post, and he doesn't so much want to debunk Trutherism as use it as a tool to slam the typical bugbears: Marxism, social justice and anti-war movements, atheism, and Kant's supposed "moral relativism." (It's always Kant's fault.)
I'm not going to say you shouldn't read it or that it was a complete waste of time; there is certainly good information in the book, and he's correct in stating that there are more 9/11 conspiracy theories out there than there are books debunking them. It's important to understand the conspiratorial mindset and to critically examine the claims of Truthers, especially given what I've said repeatedly about their infiltration into legitimate social and political movements. It's not a harmless crank theory. He does interview actual Truthers and present case studies, and that stuff is valuable to know about. I just wish this book had been written by someone who wasn't as much of a crank as his subjects.
First off, the title is misleading. Kay spends about half the book talking about Truthers and very little of it talking about other modern conspiracies, like the anti-vaccine people or the Birthers. This is because he deliberately wants to associate Trutherism with the left. His main target is not the Truthers; he's almost affectionate towards them. He spends more time talking about Toronto Palestine solidarity activism at the end of the book than he does talking about anti-vaccine hysterics. This is unfortunate, not just because I don't agree with what a writer for a far-right publication thinks of a movement I belong to, but also because it means the book fails to answer some of my burning questions. For example, he talks a lot about how belief in one conspiracy makes a person more likely to believe other conspiracies. What does this mean when Truthers largely identify as left-wing and Birthers identify exclusively as right/libertarian? Is there overlap between these two groups? What about the 90s militia movement?
Then there's the preface and the conclusion, where Kay spends an inordinate amount of time talking about how Voltaire hated atheists and how Marxism is basically a conspiracy theory. Even if you're not an atheist or a Marxist, this is pushing it. So apparently the Enlightenment was a good thing for the most part, except that it did away with religion as a powerful, unifying social institution. Being pattern-recognizing creatures, we naturally floundered for something to explain why bad things happen, and in the absence of God, many of us see the invisible hand of intention where none exists. That's not a wrong theory, but it leads to a very wrong conclusion at the end, where Kay argues that what we need is for religion to return as a unifying force. Then there's the whole idea of Marxism being a conspiracy theory, which leads to Marxists becoming conspiracy theorists, though out of all of the conspiracy theorists he profiles, very few ever identified as Marxists. Nevertheless, "Marxism is, in its broad contours, itself a form of conspiracy theory that pits evil industrialists against the common workingman."
Kay posits a "flowchart" theory of conspiracism, where a conspiracy-minded individual draws linkages between different people and institutions, and reaches the conclusion that they're all in it together. Of course, this is exactly what Kay does in his book. Because some Truthers used to be anti-war activists and others still are, and anti-war activism is linked to Palestine solidarity activism, Palestine solidarity activists believe in conspiracy theories. And everyone is an anti-Semite. Obviously. Also, identity politics is a conspiracy theory. He talks about identity politics a lot.
The other grudge Kay has is against the internet. He argues that rather than democratizing information, it leads to intellectual Balkanization and promotes misinformation. I find this interesting because he writes for the National Post. Ahem. He actually points this out as well but claims that the internet is worse for whatever reason.
At some point I gave up being annoyed with the underlying problematic nature of Kay's focus and analysis, and I just started tearing up bits of paper and bookmarking the parts that I strongly objected to.
You can tell a lot about a writer's biases by his language. When talking about the history of American conspiracism, Kay correctly points out that the social changes of the 70s had a traumatizing influence on American conservatives and launched Reagan into power. But the terminology he chooses to use in an unqualified way is telling: He refers to "on-demand abortion" and "forced busing," without scare quotes that distance himself from the politics that use these terms to manipulate opinion. He puts "neoconservativism" in scare quotes, though, and refers to "Chomskyites," towards the end.
He loses any alert modern reader early on, in a discussion of the Bilderberg Group. Now, Bilderberg conspiracism is more understandable than most conspiracy theories, even if it's a little hysterical—no one disputes the fact that rich, powerful, nasty people meet annually to talk. Secretly. Kay doesn't dispute it either; he just doesn't think that they're planning the New World Order. That's fine. His source for disputing Bilderberg conspiracism, however? Is Conrad Black. Just a suggestion: If you are attempting to debunk a conspiracy about rich and powerful men doing illegal things, it is probably not the greatest idea to counter with information gleaned from a rich and powerful man who was convicted of doing illegal things. Who is also your friend and colleague. Oy.
Then there's the fact that when he does talk about Birtherism, he's much more sympathetic than he is to the much more evidence-based claims of, say, social justice movements. Kay points out that it's true that Obama "took cocaine and flirted with extreme leftist ideologies...[M]ade his bed with a menagerie that included a crook, a former terrorist, and a black-power preacher who spouted toxic anti-American conspiracy theories [...] was raised as a Muslim in Indonesia..." and so on. Kay acknowledges that these are not "damming" (sic) facts but that they are "unprecedented." Accordingly, Birtherism can be blamed, not on the fact that the Birthers are racist, but on Obama's supposed links to left conspiracies and on a "liberal" media that doesn't attack Obama enough. He refers to David Solway, a Birther, as "genuinely insightful," for passages like:
The new aborigine [Muslims] as the contemporary embodiment of the Noble Savage invented by European exploration, thus acts as the counterfoil to our own repressed and guilt-ridden civilization. The enemy who commands our sympathies becomes the heroicizing projection of our own bad conscience. Because he possesses what we lack and desire, we are willing to live in a state of contradiction and hasten to pardon his atrocities. Thus feminists will wink at the monstrous usage of infibrilation."
Kay has a bone to pick with identity politics and specifically with Black people. He claims that Afrocentrism isn't "a conspiracy theory per se" and then goes on to describe how it is, and is also anti-Semitic, and Black bookstores sell Protocols of the Elders of Zion (they do?! Not the ones I go to!) but white people avert their eyes because we feel guilty about America's treatment of Blacks. By the way, to Kay, actual racism is a thing of the past, with the exception of anti-Semitism among Arabs and Black people.
Like most on the right, Kay has a problem with academia (many of his subjects are liberal arts professors, whom he singles out as particularly vulnerable to conspiratorial thinking because their jobs require twisting reality in inventive ways) and postmodernism. He indirectly condemns Jaques Derrida as an anti-Semite because of his association with Paul de Man. This seems irrelevant to me unless one's goal is not so much understanding conspiracism as it is to attack postmodernism and postcolonial theory as sketchy and anti-Semitic. I'm a fair woman; I don't expect Kay to really understand what Derrida was writing about, since even postmodernists don't understand Derrida, but if you don't understand him, why bring him up?
Unless—and he does this almost immediately after bringing up Derrida—your flowchart conspiracy involves the crucial link of postmodernism and "identity politics." Among Kay's real targets, as I've said, are social justice movements. In one of the most bizarre attacks, after defining identity politics as "the reconstruction (and in some cases, the wholesale invention) of history according to the viewpoint of women, blacks, gays, and other minorities—a project that replaced the historian's once-unquestioned goal of objective truth with an explicitly political, Marxist-leaning agenda aimed at empowerment and solidarity building," he launches into the following truly bizarre claim:
In my native Canada, for instance, it has become impossible to have any sort of intelligent debate about the relationship between the continent's white European settlers and the aboriginals whose ancestors first migrated from Asia at the end of the last glacial period. The historical truth about first contact between seafaring European explorers and North America's animist hunter-gatherers—that it was a meeting between two peoples at vastly different stages of technological development—was progressively phased out in favor of a narrative that suggests a meeting of two equal "nations." (Thus the rebranding of small, scattered aboriginal tribes as "First Nations" in the politically correct Canadian lexicon.) In the same vein, academic curricula were revised according to the fiction that our Western intellectual tradition had been built on the sayings and customs of wise old Indian chiefs.
Really? Really? This is what he thinks leftists think? Because I thought we believed that the technologically superior European colonists committed genocide against an ill-prepared indigenous population—because that's what actually happened. I don't even know where he's getting this crap.
And then there's the bit where he infiltrates a workshop at the Toronto Women's Bookstore, a place where I have spent a great deal of time. I won't quote it because there are almost more scare quotes than words, and he takes issue with the idea that there's such a thing as privilege or oppression, and generally whines that he's being oppressed as a straight white man by all of these grad student types.
You might also be surprised that there's a direct line drawn from Protocols to the National Post's favourite target in the whole wide world, Queers Against Israeli Apartheid. Did you know, for example, when peace activists march in anti-war rallies, they "chant for Jewish blood in Arabic"? Because I have been to said rallies and no, this is not a thing that happens. I am pretty sure that Kay doesn't speak Arabic anyway.
Ultimately, Kay claims that his issue with conspiracism is that it's anti-Enlightenment, it goes against rationalism, and so on. But his solution (after the obligatory "more education" proposal, which he himself admits is kind of useless) is a return to a different sort of pattern-forming: institutional religion. "It is important," Kay argues, "to remember that the Enlightenment did not spell the end of serious Christian theology—and most of its giants likely would have been appalled by the exercise of their legacy to promote a Godless society."
Unlike Hitchens, Dawkins, Harris, and their followers, Voltaire understood that man cannot survive on skepticism alone—that society requires some creed or overarching national project that transcends mere intellect. When the appeal of traditional religion becomes weak, darker faiths assert themselves: including not only communism, fascism, tribalism, and strident nationalism, but also more faddish intellectual pathologies such as radical identity politics, anti-Americanism, and obsessive anti-Zionism. As I've argued, all of these provide rich soil for the seeds of conspiracism.
That's the book in a nutshell—we have abandoned traditional churches and hierarchies, and the result is Loose Change. It's crazy. It's bollocks.
Like the conspiracies Kay tries to debunk (and inadvertently bolsters in some cases), there's a grain of truth and some solid research in this book. But like Cynthia McKinney, whose very legitimate criticism of America's wars and Israel's policies towards the Palestinians was derailed by her association with the 9/11 Truther movement, one can't take anything Kay says in the book seriously because he says so many other things that are demonstrably false. It would have been much more valuable to strip out many of the chapters on "conspiracy theories" like identity politics, instead of writing a book, produce a series of case studies about Truthers, Birthers, and anti-vaccine fanatics. Those interviews are actually good and useful. I felt, reading this, that much of the supposed analysis and historical background was just padding, or perhaps notes for a book that Kay really wanted to write about how awful social justice activists are. When he sticks to interviewing Truthers, he's not so bad.
Accordingly, I'm still waiting for a good analysis of Truther conspiracies. Any recommendations?
no subject
Date: 2011-09-10 10:25 pm (UTC)