Among the Truthers (15 page)

The aforementioned Webster Tarpley—an avuncular, fast-talking charmer who has been spinning conspiracy theories for the last three decades—presents another interesting example. Following his graduation from Princeton in 1966, the Fulbright Scholar moved to Rome, where he found work as a journalist. When former Italian prime minister Aldo Moro was kidnapped and killed in 1978—his body found in a car just two blocks from Tarpley's downtown Rome office—Tarpley found his life's work. The murder, he concluded, was a false-flag operation conducted by NATO intelligence officers under the guise of the Red Brigades. (“The Red Brigades are now widely recognized as CIA agents,” he told me in our interview. “The only question is whether they were
originally
agents of the CIA or whether they were [co-opted] later on. I tend to believe the former scenario.”)

As the years rolled on, Tarpley transformed into a professional conspiracy theorist, gaining international exposure through Lyndon LaRouche's cable television programs and book publishing outlets. In 2005, he set out his Truther views in a book by the name of
9/11 Synthetic Terror
:
Made in USA
, which he followed up with a weekly online radio show.

Interviewing Tarpley is an adventure: As with Alex Jones, he is a machine-gun talkaholic whose conspiracy theories extend to pretty much every world event you can name. (As already noted, he even has a detailed theory about George H. W. Bush's role in the 1981 shooting of Ronald Reagan, an event that has inspired relatively sparse attention from conspiracists.) But unlike Jones, he has an Ivy League pedigree, and a genuinely impressive knowledge of world history. He is also more methodical, having spent years developing a sort of universal typology of false-flag terrorism—one that's been adopted by countless Truther acolytes.

Essential to any false-flag enterprise, he says, are three distinct groups of people—the “patsies,” the “moles,” and the “technicians.”

The patsies, he tells me, are “the lone assassins, the [Lee Harvey] Oswalds, the [Mohamed] Attas, and so forth. These are the ones who get caught. Their characteristics are then used as the sorting principle to go after whatever group you're looking to [vilify]. If you want to go target Russians, get a Russian national to commit an act of ‘terrorism.' The giveaway is that these people are physically incapable of carrying out the act in question. Oswald couldn't have shot that many bullets with the required accuracy. The Red Brigades—the people who were supposed to have killed Moro—were wild student leftists and anarchists who didn't know what they were doing. Yet what they did [kidnapping Moro on Rome's Via Fani, after killing his five escort agents] would have done the special services proud. The Baader-Meinhof gang were a bunch of psychotics. And the 9/11 hijackers—to the extent any of them actually set foot on those airplanes—could never have done those feats of flying. Any fool can see it. These guys are the clown show in the foreground—that's it.”

The next group up, according to Tarpley, are the “moles”—a “private intelligence network that is embedded in the government, cutting across agencies transversally . . . They look like government, but they're not. A typical example is the FBI guys who made sure the 9/11 hijackers weren't arrested—but then when the deed is done, they immediately swoop in and give the public all the answers.”

Finally, Tarpley says, come the “technicians”—the professional Hollywood-style supervillains who actually do the dirty work. These include, he says, the “two or three pro marksmen” who shot JFK in Dallas, and the network of “retired military and CIA old boys” who likely hatched 9/11. But private actors are part of the technician team, too: “I believe the [9/11] command center was probably in some kind of private firm,” he tells me. “A lot of the 9/11 books say Dick Cheney ran everything. That's absurd. He's had four heart attacks—on 9/11 the guy was sitting in a bunker with one phone getting [harassed] by his wife.”

Project for the New American Century: A Modern Northwoods

When did conservatives begin plotting to create their own false flag as a pretext to invade the Middle East and Central Asia? It depends on which Truther you ask. Many trace it back to University of Chicago political philosopher Leo Strauss (1899–1973)—a figure of epic myth among neoconservatives and their most fevered critics alike—who wrestled (ambiguously) with the question of whether a guileless politician could ever hope to solve society's problems. Others cite the work of hawkish RAND Corporation analyst Albert Wohlstetter (1913–1997), one of the real-life inspirations for Dr. Strangelove in Stanley Kubrick's 1964 film of the same name.

Henry Kissinger also figures prominently in Truther mythology. In particular, conspiracists point to an article entitled “Seizing Arab Oil: How the U.S. Can Break the Oil Cartel's Stranglehold on the World,” which appeared in the March 1975 issue of
Harper's
magazine under the byline “Miles Ignotus” (described in the magazine as “a pseudonym of a Washington-based professor and defense consultant with intimate links to high-level U.S. policy makers”). In the article, the unknown author argues that the United States should exploit the next “crisis” to launch a full-fledged 40,000–man military invasion of Saudi Arabia—the goal being to force OPEC nations to bring oil prices to two dollars per barrel, and to turn the nations of the Persian Gulf into virtual colonies: “An occupation of 10 years and probably much less would suffice. Once the dust of the invasion settled, once every evidence of permanent intent became apparent, the remaining members of OPEC would see reason, and accept a binding commitment to maintain supplies at agreed prices in exchange for American withdrawal.” There is no evidence the author of these words was Kissinger. (The prevailing speculation points to conservative intellectual Edward Luttwak.) Yet the idea has become an article of faith among many conspiracists.

Some Truthers focus on another former national security advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski—who served (of all presidents) Jimmy Carter. In his 1998 book,
The Grand Chessboard
:
American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives
, Brzezinski declared: “It is imperative that no Eurasian challenger emerges capable of dominating Eurasia and thus of also challenging America,” and that “a power that dominates Eurasia would control two of the world's three most advanced and economically productive regions [including] three-fourths of the world's known energy resources.”

Then, in language that seems precisely calculated to set the hairs on a conspiracy theorist's neck on end, he lamented: “Never before has a populist democracy attained international supremacy. But the pursuit of power is not a goal that commands popular passion, except in conditions of a sudden threat or challenge to the public's sense of domestic well being. The economic self-denial (that is, defense spending) and the human sacrifice (casualties, even among professional soldiers) required in the effort are uncongenial to democratic instincts. Democracy is inimical to imperial mobilization.”

And finally, many chapters later, this oft-quoted gem: “As America becomes an increasingly multi-cultural society, it may find it more difficult to fashion a consensus on foreign policy issues, except in the circumstance of a truly massive and widely perceived direct external threat.”

But though Brzezinski's theories may sound sinister when recited in a certain way, he gets distinctly secondary billing compared to the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), a group whose membership reads like a
Who's Who
of the group now commonly lumped together as “neoconservatives.”

Formed in 1997 by Washington hawks William Kristol and Robert Kagan, PNAC was composed of conservatives who felt that America had lost its sense of purpose during the Clinton years, and that both America and the world would profit from a more assertive American foreign policy. One founder was former Florida governor Jeb Bush. Others—such as Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, Zalmay Khalilzad, I. Lewis Libby, and Paul Wolfowitz—would go on to create the nucleus of the Bush foreign policy brain trust. On June 3, 1997, they announced PNAC's presence to the world with these soaring words:

American foreign and defense policy is adrift . . . As the 20th century draws to a close, the United States stands as the world's preeminent power. Having led the West to victory in the Cold War, America faces an opportunity and a challenge: Does the United States have the vision to build upon the achievements of past decades? . . . America has a vital role in maintaining peace and security in Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. If we shirk our responsibilities, we invite challenges to our fundamental interests. The history of the 20th century should have taught us that it is important to shape circumstances before crises emerge, and to meet threats before they become dire.

From the beginning, PNAC advocated regime change in Iraq, successfully pushing Bill Clinton to sign the Iraq Liberation Act of 1998, committing the United States to regime change in Baghdad. On September 20, 2001, nine days after 9/11, the group sent a letter to George W. Bush, urging the White House to exploit the opportunity to wage war in the Middle East “even if evidence does not link Iraq directly to the attack.”

But the true smoking gun, cited again and again in the Truther literature, was the group's 2000 report, “Rebuilding America's Defenses,” in which the authors observe that “the [desired] process of [military] transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event—like a new Pearl Harbor.”

That single noun phrase, “new Pearl Harbor,” has become one of the most popular tag lines of the Truth movement—one that, in just three words, captures the historical pedigree, sinister motives, deadly means, and epic consequences of the 9/11 conspiracy, as Truthers imagine it to have unfolded. It also became the title of what would become a foundational text of the Truther movement, David Ray Griffin's 2004 book
The New Pearl Harbor
:
Disturbing Questions About the Bush Administration and 9/11
.

Connecting the dots between 1941, 1962, and 2001, Truthers have constructed not only an alternative vision of modern American history, but also an alternative vision of America itself. Gone is the image of a free nation, spreading liberty and human rights around the globe. In its place is an imperialist faux-democracy ruled by deep-state oil barons, weapons dealers, intelligence officers, and Pentagon warmongers.

“I don't know what to believe anymore,” Balsamo tells me, after summarizing his discoveries. “I feel like I'm an infant again, relearning life—because everything that I've learned before is being questioned. I look up to the guys who were called hippies in the sixties now. They've been dealing with this kind of thing for decades.

“History was one of my worst subjects in school,” he adds. “I was more interested in the other stuff—math, science, physics—because I wanted to be a pilot. Looking back, I really wish I'd paid a little bit more attention.”

Joseph Farah: Birther Extraordinaire

A concise way to describe WorldNetDaily is that it defines the exact inflection point on the spectrum of right-wing punditry where legitimate journalism ends and out-and-out conspiracism begins. On one hand, the popular website employs a staff of professional reporters who cover real stories. But it also pushes discredited conspiracy theories about Barack Obama, and has become a clearinghouse for litigious extremists challenging the constitutional legitimacy of his presidency.

The brain behind WorldNetDaily is Joseph Farah, a middle-aged Arab American Christian Evangelical who originally made a name for himself two decades ago as editor of the
Sacramento Union
(where he picked a then-obscure pundit named Rush Limbaugh to be his daily front-page columnist). He began WorldNetDaily on a shoestring in 1997, in the days before many news websites even had advertisements, growing it into a profitable agglomeration of right-wing columns, original investigative articles, oddball medical product pitches, gold-buggery, an affiliated book-selling business, and, more recently, the sort of face-of-Jesus-revealed-in-oil-stain hokum usually found on the covers of supermarket tabloids. The ideology on display roughly coincides with the nativist, homophobic, socially conservative right-wing fringe of the Republican Party, but with an even heavier dose of paranoia and freaked-out America-gone-to-Gomorrah sensationalism. One mass emailing sent out in April 2010, for instance, asked readers to congregate at the Lincoln Memorial on May 1 to “cry ‘May Day!' to God for our nation in distress . . . The elections are seven long months away and if God doesn't intervene now, there may not be freedom left to meet like this again.” The next month, Farah said that his preferred 2012 presidential candidate was Senator Jim DeMint, a South Carolina politician who once declared that openly gay people and unwed mothers shouldn't be permitted to teach in public schools.

It wasn't always this way for Farah. “In high school, I was a revolutionary communist, a Che Guevera type,” he told me during a 2009 interview in the lobby of an upscale Virginia hotel. (The meeting spot was a compromise: I'd pestered him to show me WorldNetDaily's Washington, D.C. offices, but he refused.) “I didn't know anyone who had a more radical viewpoint than me.” Only later in life did Farah follow the example of
Radical Son
author David Horowitz: drifting rightward across the full breadth of the American political spectrum to the opposite pole, then spending his middle-aged years denouncing the fellow travelers he left behind.

As with many of today's middle-aged Road-to-Damascus conservatives, it was the Gipper who changed Farah's perspective. “Within a year of watching [Ronald] Reagan, I started reading everything he read, and I started thinking
this makes perfect sense!
During that first year—1981—my views changed dramatically. I saw [an ideology] that worked. The more I studied Reagan, and Margaret Thatcher, too, I thought, ‘I don't know how anyone can dispute any of this.' ” In time, Reagan's famous line from his first inaugural address—that “government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem”—became Farah's political mantra.

Needless to say, Farah finds Barack Obama's policies appalling. But he also sees Obama as a possible blessing in disguise—as someone so offensive to American values that his presidency could provoke a revolutionary, rightward shift in the political landscape on a scale even greater than Ronald Reagan's 1980 election victory: “Americans aren't political. But with Obama, that's changed. I haven't seen anything like this in my life. This is bigger than the 1960s. That was just kids on campus. What we're seeing now are ordinary Americans. This anger is finally clicking.”

T
he next time I saw Farah, in early 2010, he was standing behind a podium delivering a keynote address to the inaugural Tea Party National Convention in Nashville, Tennessee. The six hundred activists in attendance comprised a friendly audience: Many of them, including the conference organizer who introduced Farah, described WorldNetDaily as their primary source for news.

Farah warmed up the audience with a joke about a medical conference where doctors are bragging about their nation's technological prowess. “A French MD says, ‘Medicine in my country is so advanced that we can take a kidney from one man, put it in another, and have him looking for work in six weeks,' ” Farah told the crowd. “A German doctor says, ‘That's nothing. We can take a lung out of one person, put it in another, and have him looking for work in
four
weeks.' To that, a Russian doctor said, ‘In my country, medicine is so advanced that we can take half a heart out of one person, put it in another person, and have him looking for work in
two
weeks.' Then the American physician gets up and says, ‘You guys are
way
behind. We recently took a guy with no birth certificate, no brain, and put him in the White House—and now half the country is looking for work!' ”

After waiting for the applause to die down, Farah launched into a lengthy dissertation challenging the idea that Barack Obama is a natural-born citizen who is constitutionally eligible to be president of the United States—a Birther conspiracy riff, in other words—every word of it carried to a national audience on C-SPAN.

“I'm a Christian, and I make no apologies about that,” Farah declared. “I'm a follower of Jesus Christ . . . I want to share with you briefly how the most important birth in history, that of Jesus of Nazareth was so well documented, unlike Barack Obama's. Jesus established himself as the Messiah and savior of the world by providing not one but two separate and distinct genealogical records, one gong all the way back to Adam, and another tracing his kingly lineage back to Abraham . . . There's no doubt about where he was born, when, and his parentage. Jesus recognized those qualifications were essential to establishing his right to his earthly throne as king of the Jews. In fact, look at your Bibles. The first seventeen verses of
Matthew
are devoted to his genealogy through the line of Mary . . . That's because God didn't want there to be any doubts about Jesus' eligibility or qualifications to be the King of Kings. There's a lesson in this story for Barack Obama. His nativity story is much less known!”

As Farah went on with his conspiracism, I looked around the room for signs of skepticism. If there were any, I didn't see them. In fact, Farah's speech earned a series of healthy ovations.

Obama's August 4, 1961, birth in a Honolulu hospital is documented by birth announcements in not one, but two, Hawaii newspapers. He has released a certified 2007 copy of his birth certificate, disproving the Birther thesis that he was born in Kenya or Indonesia. Every litigant who has tried to make an issue of Obama's presidential eligibility in the courts has been decisively rebuffed. And yet this crowd of political activists was willing to put their hands together for a speaker citing the Bible to support his contention that the president of the United States is some sort of illegal alien. Why?

Drinking Tea in Nashville

“I voted for Jimmy Carter, I'll admit that,” the middle-aged New Jersey pediatrician with a George Carlin hairstyle tells me over breakfast at the Gaylord Opryland Hotel in Nashville, as we wait for the 2010 Tea Party National Convention to commence. “And then the years passed, and I watched as the United States diminished in stature. The low point came when our helicopters crashed in the Iranian desert. We couldn't even rescue our own people. That's when I knew something was wrong.”

Since then, he told me, things have only gotten worse. Over the Christmas holidays, he'd traveled to mainland China, visiting factories now being run by an old family friend. “The places were beautiful—air-conditioned and all that. Everywhere I looked, buildings were springing up. Cranes and construction as far as the eye could see. It reminded me of the United States back in the 1950s, my parents' time. Then I go back home to New Jersey, and I look around, and things are dead.”

When quoted in the media, Tea Party activists usually are heard railing against health care reform, cap-and-trade carbon abatement, or some other national policy that piques the interest of reporters at CNN and Politico. But when you get them in a small group, away from the cameras, they spend a lot of time talking about state and local issues. Dan, for instance, went on for a long time about double-dipping—New Jersey public servants who end up getting two pensions because they work at two different state jobs.

“I'm a doctor. I make a pretty good living on paper,” he tells me. “But New Jersey has a 12 percent state tax. By the time I'm done paying all the governments, my tax load is around 60 percent. I've got two kids in college. After paying the government, I've got nothing left to put away.”

Another middle-aged fellow at our breakfast table, a former Marine who'd worked for two decades with the Los Angeles Police Department, pipes up with similar complaints. “The way the LAPD works, you can get most of your pension even if you quit in your forties, after just twenty years on the force—then they hire you back the next day as a ‘consultant.' This is why governments are going bankrupt.”

A common theme in my conversations was the bias of the media—which most Tea Partiers believe, with some justification, has bent over backwards to give Barack Obama an easy ride. (Indeed, one of the most striking moments of the whole convention came when blogger Andrew Breitbart delivered a particularly vicious fulmination against the liberal bias of the major networks and broadsheet newspapers, prompting literally everyone in the room to get up, turn toward the media section at the back of the conference room, and scream, “U-S-A! U-S-A! U-S-A!”)

Tea Party organizers tend to describe their agenda with five bullet points: Lower taxes, less government spending, greater liberty, state's rights, national security. But that quintet—which also summarizes the major planks of the Republican Party—is misleading. The Tea Party movement is mostly made up of refugees from the mainstream GOP. They rail hard against RINOs (Republicans In Name Only). Bipartisanship—“kumbaya politics,” as it's derisively called—is dismissed as a sell-out. Many of them are protectionists, in violation of Republican free-trade dogma. Their stance on immigration often flirts with xenophobia. Unlike buttoned-down corporate conservatives, they also tend to go in for oddball practices—do-it-yourself solar power generation, backyard food farming, Internet-peddled herbal medications, homeschooling, dubious tax-avoidance schemes—that hold out the promise of disentanglement from government regulators and their infrastructural grids.

Like all populists, Tea Partiers are suspicious of power and influence, and anyone who wields them. Their villain list includes the big banks; bailed-out corporations; James Cameron (whose
Avatar
is seen as a veiled denunciation of the U.S. military); colleges and universities (the more prestigious, the more evil). Their ideological heroes, meanwhile, tend to be people who are either criticizing Washington from beyond its gates (Sarah Palin), or dead (Ronald Reagan), and thus protected from the taint of power.

The economic tribulations that began in the last year of Bush's presidency hang heavy over the Tea Party and its events: Virtually every conversation comes back to joblessness in some way. In an echo of the populist fervor that arose amidst the economic ruts of the late nineteenth century—when Greenbackers, Free Silver types, and bimetallists all railed at the gold-hoarders in New York City and London—there is much dark talk about the banking system and those who run it.

The analogy between the populist movements of the nineteenth century and the Tea Party phenomenon holds up in some ways: Both championed a constitutionally inspired counterrevolution that would empower ordinary working people by casting off the deadening hand of society's parasitic plutocrats. Yet there are also many major differences. The late nineteenth-century populists of the Great Plains and the Southern states cast their movement as a campaign by rural yeomen, who produced real things like timber, ore, and food, against the city folk who did nothing but count gold and trade stocks—a populist subphilosophy described by American historians as “producerism,” and encapsulated in William Jennings Bryan's “cross of gold” speech at the 1896 Democratic National Convention: “Burn down your cities, and leave our farms, and your cities will spring up again as if by magic; but destroy our farms and the grass will grow in the street of every city in the country.”

As recently as the recession of the 1980s and 1990s, producerism took expression in anti-Japanese protectionism, Ross Perot, and pick-up-truck-commercial imagery that depicted proud, unionized American workers facing off against foreign sweatshops. There are thin wisps of this in the Tea Party movement: Sarah Palin, in particular, tends to fill her speeches with homages to the common workingman that would not have been out of place a century ago. (It isn't a coincidence that the greatest populist figure of our generation comes from Alaska, one of the few places in America that still relies on dirt-under-the-fingernails industries such as oil and fish.) But for the most part, such appeals are outdated: America doesn't really produce much out of steel and wood anymore. And a lot of what it does produce tends to be welded by robots or plucked out of the ground by illegal immigrants. Most Tea Partiers, like most other Americans these days, tend to be well-educated urban desk jockeys—consultants, health care administrators, mortgage brokers. Unlike farming and other rugged pursuits, these are hard professions to romanticize.

Another major difference comes in the prevalent attitude toward capitalism. In the 1890s, populists typically demanded government intervention to protect the rural way of life from the predations of monopolists and bankers. The Populist Party platform of 1892, in particular, declared “that the power of government—in other words, of the people—should be expanded.” The manifesto called for more powerful unions, a state takeover of the railroads, and an increase in the money supply.