Among the Truthers (23 page)

The best example I have come across is veteran conspiracy theorist Michael Ruppert, whose 2004 book,
Crossing the Rubicon
:
The Decline of the American Empire at the End of the Age of Oil
, likely ranks as the most influential Truther tome ever published. (Ruppert says it has sold more than one hundred thousand copies.) From a commercial perspective, his psychological state sits in a perfect sweet spot: He is psychologically balanced enough to write lucidly and command a following with his books, but also sufficiently delusional to imagine himself at the center of fantastic, Hollywood-style cloak-and-dagger narratives.

Ruppert's descent into paranoia began in 1976, with a woman. At the time, Ruppert was a rookie LAPD narcotics detective with stellar performance evaluations and a bright future. Then, during an evening out at Brennan's Bar in Marina del Ray, he met “Teddy,” and fell in love. After the two became engaged, the relationship soured, and Teddy headed east, to New Orleans. Unable to make phone contact, Ruppert hopped on a plane in romantic pursuit—and entered what he describes as a “Dantean” demimonde of James Bond intrigue, one he seems to inhabit to this day. “Arriving in New Orleans, I found her living in an apartment across the river from the Gretna. Equipped with a scrambler phone and night vision devices, and working from sealed communiqués delivered by naval and air force personnel from nearby Belle Chasse Naval Air Station, she was involved in something truly ugly. She was arranging for large quantities of weapons to be loaded onto ships leaving for Iran. The ships were owned by a company that is today a subsidiary of Halliburton—Brown and Root. She was working with Mafia associates of New Orleans Mafia boss Carlos Marcello to coordinate the movement of service boats that were bringing large quantities of heroin into the city. The boats arrived regularly at Marcello-controlled docks, unmolested by the New Orleans police she introduced me to. Through her I also met hard-hat drivers, military men, Brown and Root employees, former Green Berets, and CIA personnel . . . Disgusted and heartbroken at witnessing my fiancée and my government smuggling drugs, I ended the relationship.”

It's hard to say whether any of this is true—or whether the entire episode wasn't an extended psychotic delusion: After interviewing the man for two hours at his small, tidy Culver City, California, home, I'm still not sure. But it's beyond question that the trauma of this romantic breakup turned this once up-and-coming law enforcement officer into a full-time paranoiac. Within two years of meeting “Teddy,” Ruppert checked himself into a psychiatric hospital, complaining about death threats. Soon thereafter, he left the LAPD, and began peddling different versions of his story—including the contention that the CIA tried to recruit him to protect its L.A.-area drug operations—to whatever credulous journalists would listen.

As noted previously, he jumped early and hard onto the Truther bandwagon following 9/11, touring college campuses on the West Coast as early as November 2001. In that early period, he developed key tenets of the movement's mythology—such as the notion that the attacks were the brainchild of Dick Cheney, and that the planes were flown by remote control. He even claimed to have developed a source—a small-time criminal and con artist named Delmart Vreeland, a man that JFK conspiracy buffs might describe as the Rose Cheramie of 9/11 conspiracy mythology—who could prove foreknowledge of the 9/11 attacks.

Like Estulin and other megalomaniacal paranoiacs, Ruppert describes his life as a cycle of near-death experiences and epic triumphs. He's been targeted by secret-service assassins several times, he says—most recently in Switzerland in 2003. While in “exile” in Hugo Chavez's Venezuela a few years back, he claims to have been poisoned with a local drug called Burandenga (“picture a date-rape drug times fifty,” he tells me). He describes black helicopters circling overhead when he meets with other “insiders,” and claims that the government attacked the offices of his (now defunct) website,
From the Wilderness
, using “microwave weapons.” He also casually compares himself to Lenin, and claims that his investigations led to the resignation of Donald Rumsfeld.

The Crank

“Angry” is an adjective often used to describe the current state of American politics. But nothing in today's Washington could possibly compare with a speech delivered to Congress in 1868 by Ignatius Donnelly, Republican congressman for Minnesota's Second Congressional District. Rising before his peers to rebut charges of impropriety made against him by Illinois congressman Elihu Washburne, Donnelly fulminated thusly:

If anywhere on God's earth, down in the mire of filth and nastiness, [Washburne] can pluck up anything that touches my honor, let it come. I shall meet it on its merits. I have gone through the entire catalogue; I have analyzed the contents of the gentleman's foul stomach. I have dipped my hand into its gall; I have examined the half-digested fragments that I have found floating in the gastric juices; but if it is possible for the peristaltic actions of the gentleman from Illinois to bring up anything more loathsome, more disgusting than he has vomited over me [already], in God's name, let it come . . . If there be in our midst one low, sordid, vulgar soul; one barren, mediocre intelligence; one heart callous to every kindly sentiment and every generous impulse, one tongue leprous with slander; one mouth which like unto a den of foul beast giving forth deadly odors; if there be one character which, while blotched and spotted all over, yet raves and rants and blackguards like a prostitute; if there be here one bold, bad, empty bellowing demagogue, it is the gentleman from Illinois.

Donnelly, who already had developed a reputation in Washington as a loose cannon, flamed out of national politics shortly thereafter. Yet the meltdown proved a blessing in disguise, for it allowed him to follow the calling for which he was ideally suited: crankdom.

Even during his career as a politician, Donnelly spent much of his time in the Library of Congress, devouring the contents stack by stack. After returning to his home in rural Minnesota, he became a bookworm full time, developing a particular interest in life under the ocean. Out of this obsession came his 490-page epic,
Atlantis
:
The Antediluvian World
, in which Donnelly instructed readers

That Atlantis was the region where man first rose from a state of barbarism to civilization; that it became, in the course of ages, a populous and mighty nation, from whose overflowings the shores of the Gulf of Mexico, the Mississippi River, the Amazon, the Pacific coast of South America, the Mediterranean, the west coast of Europe and Africa, the Baltic, the Black Sea, and the Caspian were populated by civilized nations; that It was the true antediluvian world, the Garden of Eden; that the gods and goddesses of the ancient Greeks, the Phoenicians, the Hindus, and the Scandinavians were simply the kings, queens and heroes of Atlantis; and the acts attributed to them in mythology, a confused recollection of real historical events; . . . that Atlantis perished in a terrible convulsion of nature, in which the whole island was submerged in the ocean, with nearly all its inhabitants; that a few persons escaped in ships and on rafts, and carried to the nations east and west tidings of the appalling catastrophe.

The book became a best seller, going through dozens of editions. (It remains in print to this day as a staple of New Age reading lists.) But Donnelly was just getting started. From his home in Minnesota, the “Prince of Cranks” (as he later was dubbed) followed up
Atlantis
with
Ragnarok
:
Age of Fire and Gravel
, which argued that Atlantis was destroyed by a passing comet, and that the contours of our earth were formed by a massive barrage of extraterrestrial gravel. Then came
Caesar's Column—
the dystopic protoscience-fiction novel discussed in Chapter 1–which warned humanity about the catastrophic revolution that would come if America did not reform its political system. A few years later, he produced an arcane anti-Stratfordian manifesto called
The Great Cryptogram
, in which Donnelly tried to prove—by counting and multiplying the number of different kinds of words in Shakespeare's plays—that Francis Bacon had encoded a secret cipher proving his authorship of the Bard's entire
oeuvre
. By the time Donnelly died on New Year's Day, 1901, in fact, he had put his stamp on just about every strain of conspiracism and crankdom that would emerge in the eleven decades following his death.

And yet, as you read through Donnelly's life story—as told in Martin Ridge's 1962 biography,
Portrait of a Politician—
it's hard not to root for the man. He's not exactly a likeable character (as Elihu Washburne might have attested). But he did have the quality then known as pluck—what today we would call chutzpah. “Donnelly genuinely believed he was a genius, and that, by applying his mental powers to any problem, no matter how tangled or intractable, and regardless of the established body of relevant scholarship or scientific tradition, he could solve it with a fresh look,” is how J. M. Tyree put it in a 2005 essay. “Congressman, master orator, pseudo-scientist, student of comparative mythology, crackpot geologist, futurist, amateur literary sleuth, bogus cryptologist, Donnelly did it all with a charmingly boundless energy and a voracious intellectual appetite.”

In his fearless commitment to truth-seeking (as he imagined it), Donnelly personified one of America's defining intellectual traditions. America, it is important to remember, has always been a land of cranks. Just as capitalism and the industrial revolution set every yeoman free to build a better musket or mousetrap in his barn or basement, the American Enlightenment set loose a million eccentrics to sweep away the dogmas inherited from Europe, with each championing his own cobbled-together religious movement, political party, or civic group.

As a conspiracist, the crank's defining feature is an acute, inveterately restless, furiously contrarian intelligence. Many cranks have an Asperger's-like obsession with arithmetic, flowcharts, maps, and lengthy data lists. Like Donnelly, they are unable to take any expert's word on even the most technical subject. The crank can be satisfied only once he has personally established the truth of his theories using nothing but primary sources and the rules of logic.

What drives cranks on an emotional level isn't the substance of their theories: Many of the Truther cranks I've interviewed—including David Ray Griffin, Barrie Zwicker, and Paul Zarembka, all discussed in this book—treated the issue of 9/11 Truth in large part as a debating exercise, and seemed curiously detached from the profoundly disturbing implications that flow from their claims. What cranks truly crave is the exhilarating sense of independence, control, and superiority that come from declaring oneself a self-sufficient intellectual force. Conspiracism is a natural outlet for this craving since conspiracy theories always exist in opposition to some received truth that enjoys the blessing of experts, and because the associated claims are regarded as daring and controversial.

Cranks typically are intellectual workaholics—“independent researcher” is how they often refer to these activities—furiously endeavoring to master all of the specialized knowledge required to prove their theories from first principles. Over the years, their homes become transformed into archives, overrun with great stacks of research materials. Within conspiracy movements, they comprise the role of “back office,” churning out the tracts that less dedicated and energetic conspiracy theorists use as their source material. Cranks rarely are bigoted or hateful in their attitudes—but their penchant for fringe crusades sometimes draws them into movements that answer to these descriptives. (A textbook example is writer Joseph Sobran [1946–2010], who gained renown as a stylist and conservative thinker at the
National Review
under William F. Buckley Jr., but who slid into crankdom during the 1990s. In his final years, he became so thoroughly detached from reality that he saw nothing wrong with appearing at Holocaust-denier conferences alongside full-fledged anti-Semites.)

Social interactions with cranks usually are memorable. One of the oddest interviews I conducted for this book was with Barrie Zwicker, an amiable crank who became Canada's leading 9/11 Truther in the aftermath of a long career as a mainstream journalist. When I spoke with him at his cluttered Toronto home, he announced that he would be interviewing me (about my
nonbelief
in Trutherdom) in parallel with my own questions. As we talked, he hit buttons on a chess clock to regulate our usage of time—making sure we each questioned the other for exactly the same number of minutes. For reasons that seem obvious to me from such experiences, there are no crank women, only crank men.

Typically, the crank is a math teacher, computer scientist, chess player, or investigative journalist—careers in which the mind is trained to tease complex patterns out of empirical data. Like Donnelly, many come to their crankdom in middle age, or at the end of their working lives, as they are casting about for some project to occupy their hyperactive brains. In some cases, cranks are high-functioning intellectuals frustrated by a menial profession (the most notorious example being the voluble taxi driver with a crank theory about every news item that comes across his radio).

Marshall McLuhan—the communications theorist who told us “the medium is the message”—was a classic crank: He spent much of his leisure time scanning the personals columns in Toronto newspapers, seeking out coded messages about the time and place for “black masses” where, he believed, the Masons and other secret societies would meet to hatch their conspiracies. McLuhan's obsession with the Masons, politely ignored by most of the scholars who've analyzed his life and work, is described in Philip Marchand's biography,
The Medium and the Messenger
. According to Marchand, McLuhan believed that the American Civil War had really been a feud between Masonry's northern and southern branches; and—closer to home—that Masons “controlled book reviews in important periodicals.”