![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Were 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.
( I get the feeling this is gonna be long! )
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.
( I get the feeling this is gonna be long! )
