Among the Truthers (32 page)

Consider, for instance, the manner in which men were portrayed by self-described “radical lesbian feminist” and “ecofeminist” Mary Daly, who taught courses in theology and “patriarchy” at Boston College from 1967 to 1999 (at which point she was fired for refusing to admit men into her classes). According to Daly, the human race was divided between “necrophilic” men and “biophilic” (life-loving) women. Christianity and other organized religions also were anathema to the pagan Daly—since she regarded them as interchangeably patriarchal. She even refused to identify herself as a “human being,” since this category was infected by the neurotoxin of maleness: “I hate the ‘human species'—look at it!” she told an interviewer in 1999. “I hate what it is doing to this earth: the invasion of everything. The last two frontiers are the genetic wilderness and the space wilderness; they've colonized everything else. It's a totally invasive mentality—rapist. That is
alien
, and insofar as I've internalized any of that, I'm sorry. I'm contaminated by it. We all are.”

Like an early Zionist, Daly sought to create a geographical “homeland”—one reserved for “women who identify as women.” In her book
Quintessence
, she rhapsodized that such an all-female, “gynocentric” society wouldn't need men: reproduction would be accomplished through parthenogenesis. When magazine interviewer Susan Bridle asked Daly what she thought about a related proposal put forward by another radical lesbian feminist, Sally Miller Gearhart, that “the proportion of men must be reduced to and maintained at approximately 10% of the human race,” Daly responded: “I think it's not a bad idea at all. If life is to survive on this planet, there must be a decontamination of the Earth. I think this will be accompanied by an evolutionary process that will result in a drastic reduction of the population of males. People are afraid to say that kind of stuff anymore.”

The “stuff” Daly referred to here was, of course, eugenics—the “improvement” of humankind through the selective extermination of “undesirable” elements within the population. As the quotation in the paragraph above illustrates, Daly often spoke of men the way the Nazis spoke of Jews. Should any modern scholar make similar remarks about breeding out, say, blacks, or Jews, or gays, they would instantly become an object of disgrace. Yet Daly continued to be a cult hero among radical feminists until her death in 2010: According to Bridle, she is “one of the most revered visionaries of the contemporary women's liberation movement” and “the grande dame of feminist theology”—not to mention “a demolition derbyist of patriarchal ‘mindbindings.' ”

On a basic level, Daly's hyperpolitically correct conspiracism can be viewed simply as radical populism stood on its head: Like the militant fringe of the Tea Party movement, Daly believed American society is locked in an ideological war between effeminate, left-wing, pagan ecopacifists and traditionally minded, star-spangled Christian culture warriors. The only point of disagreement is which utopia we should be rooting for—the “necrophilic” America of yesteryear, or the “biophilic” cloud city of the future.

But in one very profound way, Daly's left-wing campus conspiracism is actually more radical than the sensational YouTube fare served up even by the most delusional New World Order types. That's because, for all their paranoia, men such as Alex Jones, Michael Ruppert, David Ray Griffin, Richard Gage, and Joseph Farah truly do believe that the facts of history matter—that there is a central, objective, historical truth out there, and that their own investigations are crucial for finding out what it is. Daly, on the other hand, freely admitted that her historical reveries about a utopian “pre-patriarchal” stage of human history were based on romantic invention. But as she told Bridle, this shouldn't bother anyone:

What is the risk? I mean, we live in hell. This is called hell. H-E-L-L—patriarchy. . . . Is it romantic to try to remember something better than that? There's a reality gap here. How can I make it clearer? We're living in hell and [a critic is] talking about a danger of romanticism in imagining something that is a hope for something better in the future? I think that the question comes from not looking deeply enough at the horror of phallocracy. . . . If you experience the horror of what is happening to women all the time, it is almost unbearable, right? All the time! . . . Then, when you are acutely aware of that and desire to exorcise it, the exorcism welcomes, requires, some kind of dream.

All this, I believe, helps explain why there is such a paucity of academic research in the field of conspiracy theories. The tone of the available papers suggests why: Most researchers seem hesitant to suggest that
any
view of the world—no matter how preposterous—is unambiguously wrong. The guiding notion, echoing the plot of Thomas Pynchon's influential blockbuster,
Gravity's Rainbow
, was that the institutionalized conspiracy woven into the fabric of corporate capitalism is more sinister than any narrative concocted by the likes of the Truth movement.

In some cases, I found, full-blown conspiracy theories have even made their way into seemingly mainstream university programs. In late 2010, for instance, the University of Lethbridge, in the Canadian province of Alberta, announced that it was awarding a $7,714 scholarship to conspiracy theorist Joshua Blakeney so that he could pursue his 9/11 Truth research under the direction of Globalization Studies professor Anthony Hall, a fellow Truther.

In 2006, the peer-reviewed
Administrative Theory & Praxis
, a prestigious quarterly devoted to “critical, normative, and theoretical dialogue in public administration,” and supported by the School of Public Affairs at Arizona State University, published an article by tenured Florida State University professor Lance deHaven-Smith, lamenting that “citizens of the United States continue to be victimized by suspicious incidents that benefit top public officials, and yet Americans have no way of knowing whether the incidents are unavoidable events or, instead, crimes initiated or facilitated by the officials themselves.” DeHaven-Smith's bill of particulars includes “the defense failures on September 11, 2001 (9/11); the anthrax attacks on U.S. Senators a month later; and the series of terror alerts issued on the basis of flimsy evidence.”

As it turned out, deHaven-Smith was just getting started. In 2008, he coauthored an academic paper detailing the machinations of a “criminal, militaristic/fiscal cabal” operating at the highest echelons of the U.S government—a group of super-secret James Bond–like agents that he calls “SCAD-Net.” (The acronym stands for State Crimes against Democracy, a term deHaven-Smith proposes as an alternative for “conspiracy theory,” which he complains is “associated with paranoia and hare-brained speculation.”) While the paper begins with the usual array of rarified academic jargon and dense footnotes, it quickly morphs into a freeform conspiracist meditation on Skull and Bones, Malcolm X, and dozens of other conspiracist obsessions. In particular, we learn, JFK's death was “probably” the work of J. Edgar Hoover, [CIA official] Richard Helms, Lyndon Johnson, [US Air Force Chief of Staff] Curtis LeMay, and (“almost certainly”) Richard Nixon. The Warren Commission was a “cover-up.” SCAD-Net also likely murdered Robert Kennedy, stole the 2000 presidency for Bush-Cheney, and perpetrated the 9/11 attacks. And more plots are on the way: One chapter is entitled “SCAD-Net is likely to strike again in 2012–2013, probably with a ‘dirty' bomb at a sporting event.” Two years later, in 2010, deHaven-Smith again found a respectable scholarly home for his SCAD-Net conspiracism, this time in
American Behavioral Scientist
, which devoted its entire February 2010 issue to the subject—much of it consisting of full-blown 9/11 conspiracism.

According to one of my correspondents, who was present when deHaven-Smith and his coauthors presented their 2008 paper at Virginia Commonwealth University, no one in the crowd seemed distressed that their conference had become a forum for conspiracist fantasies. This did not altogether surprise me: Modern academics tend to romanticize the conspiracy theorist (at least in his nonracist manifestation), imagining him to be a source of “countercultural opposition,” “narratives of resistance,” or (as Foucault called them) “subjugated knowledge.” Many, like deHaven-Smith, refuse even to use the term “conspiracy theory.” Writing in the
Journal of Black Studies
, for instance, Denison University scholar Anita Waters argued instead for the term “ethnosociology,” and urged that we “reserve opinion” about their truth. By way of example, she cited AIDS conspiracy theories, which might be seen as “a logical outcome of the process by which ‘urban African Americans are struggling to conceptualize the threatening ecological and social decay' that surrounds them.”

In his introduction to the 2002 book
Conspiracy Nation
:
The Politics of Paranoia in Postwar America
, University of Manchester professor Peter Knight assures his readers that “the essays in this collection refuse instantly to dismiss [conspiracism] as the product of narrow-minded crackpot paranoia or the intellectual slumming of those who should know better.” Rutgers University media-studies professor Jack Bratich, another prominent commentator on conspiracism, criticizes the “expertism” of those who would dismiss AIDS conspiracy theories out of hand, and instead seeks a “nuanced approach” that “looks for their origins in social, cultural and economic conditions.” Skip Willman of the University of South Dakota (formerly of the Georgia Institute of Technology) applauds conspiracy theories as “an oppositional political culture in the shadow of the marketplace and its attendant consumerism.” And then there's Eithne Quinn, one of a long line of university academics to build her career on the literary analysis of rap-music lyrics. In her essay “All Eyez On Me: The Paranoid Style of Tupac Shakur,” she gushes that Tupac's violent, obscene conspiracism offers “profound connections between the personal and the political, the psychic and the social, the individual and the larger relations of power. Such critical thinking is of course essential to the production of political consciousness.”

Among the Antiracists

Those who authentically commit themselves to the people must re-examine themselves constantly . . . Conversion to the people requires a profound rebirth. Those who undergo it must take on a new form of existence; they can no longer remain as they were. Only through comradeship with the oppressed can the converts understand their characteristic ways of living and behaving, which in diverse moments reflect the structure of domination.

—Paulo Freire,
Pedagogy of the Oppressed

Sandy, Jim, and Karen work at a downtown community center where they help low-income residents apply for rental housing. Sandy has a bad feeling about Jim: She notices that when black clients come in, he tends to drift to the back of the office. Sandy suspects racism. (She and Jim are both white.) On the other hand, she also notices that Jim seems to get along well with Karen, who is black. As the weeks go by, Sandy becomes more uncomfortable with the situation. But she feels uncertain about how to handle it. Test question: What should Sandy do?

If you answered that Sandy's first move should be to talk to Karen, and ask how Jim's behavior made her feel, you are apparently a better antiracist than I am: That, for what it's worth, was the preferred solution offered by my instructor at
Thinking About Whiteness and Doing Anti-Racism
, a four-part evening workshop for community activists, presented in early 2010 at the Toronto Women's Bookstore.

My own answer, announced aloud in class, was that Sandy should approach Jim discretely, explaining to him how others in the office might
perceive
his actions. Or perhaps the manager of the community center could be asked to give a generic presentation about the need to treat clients in a color-blind manner, on a no-names basis.

The problem with my approach, the instructor indicated, lay in the fact that I was primarily concerned with the feelings of my fellow Caucasian, Jim. I wasn't treating Karen like a “full human being” who might have thoughts and feelings at variance with her superficially friendly workplace attitude.

Moreover, I was guilty of “democratic racism”—by which we apply ostensibly race-neutral principles, such as “due process,” constantly demanding clear “evidence” of wrongdoing, rather than confronting prima facie instances of racism head-on. “It seems we're always looking for more proof,” said the instructor, an energetic thirtysomething left-wing activist named Sheila Wilmot who's been teaching this course for several years. “When it comes to racism, you have to trust your gut.”

I felt the urge to pipe up at this. Racism is either a serious charge or it's not. And if it is, as everyone in this room clearly believed, then it cannot be flung around casually without giving the accused a chance to explain his actions. But I said nothing, and nodded my head along with everyone else. I'd come to this class not to impose my democratic racism on people, but to observe.

Most of the other thirteen students were grad student types in their twenties—too young to remember the late 1980s and early 1990s, when political correctness first took root on college campuses. The jargon I heard at the Women's Bookstore took me back to that age—albeit with a few odd variations. “Allyship” has replaced “solidarity” in the antiracist lexicon, for instance, when speaking about interracial activist partnerships. I also heard one student say she rejected the term “gender-neutral” as sexist, and instead preferred “gender-
fluid
.” One did not “have” a gender or sexual orientation, moreover. The operative word is “perform”—as in, “Sally performs her queerness in a very femme way.”