Eight Kinds of Conspiracy Theorist
Conspiracy theories are spreading faster than ever and causing real damage to America, says journalist Jonathan Kay. His new book, Among the Truthers, describes' his two-year "journey through America's growing conspiracist underground." Part of the book explains conspiracism historically – as a reaction, in part, to big national traumas, like wars or assassinations; but the heart of the book, a section titled "Why They Believe," looks into the psychology of conspiracism – that is, what makes individuals believe seemingly nutjob theories. He comes up with a field guide that breaks conspiracy theorists down into eight distinct types, as you'll see in the following slides.
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The Midlife Crisis Case
Type: "Like all forms of midlife crisis, the sudden lurch into conspiracism offers middle-aged men a sense of revitalization and adventure, writes Kay. "For a middle-aged man who's grown tired of life's patterns, conspiracism provides more than just fresh surroundings: It offers an entirely new reality."
Example: Richard Gage. Gage heads a California-based group Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth. The group focuses on the precise sequence of events leading to the collapse of the WTC, which Gage is convinced was brought down not by planes alone but by "controlled demolition." A fixture on the Truther speaking circuit, he's known for his 600-slide Powerpoint presentation, Blueprint for Truth, which purports to debunk the official account of 9/11. "I would rather die speaking the truth than live in a police state, which is what 9/11 laid the groundwork for," he tells Kay. Gage caught the 9/11 Truth bug in 2006 after attending a talk by a leading Truther, David Ray Griffin. His obsession has cost him friends, his career as an architect, his marriage, and his house.
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The Failed Historian
Type: "For this group," writes Kay "conspiracy theories are a tool to eliminate the cognitive dissonance that arrives when the course of human events doesn't cooperate with the results demanded by their ideology."
Example: Sigmund Freud. Freud believed that Shakespeare was not the Bard of Stratford-Upon-Avon but someone else entirely. His famous Oedipal interpretation of Hamlet depended on the idea that the play was in part a response to the death of Shakespeare's father; when it turned out the father had died after the writing of Hamlet, Freud changed the history underlying his reading, not the reading itself – he bought into the theory that the play's author was an English aristocrat whose father had died in the right time frame. As a Freud biographer put it, Freud wished that "a certain part of reality could be changed."
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The Damaged Survivor
Type: "Damaged survivors are particularly effective as recruiters for conspiracist movements," writes Kay, "because the spectacle of their grief short-circuits our intellectual faculties."
Example: Jenny McCarthy. The former Playboy model has carved out a second act as the world's most influential purveyor of autism misinformation. She has taken to shows like Oprah and (the now defunct) Larry King Live to talk up the miraculous alternative therapies that allowed her son to "recover" from autism – an incurable genetic disorder – and tout discredited theories tying autism to vaccines. Under her influence, parents have avoided vaccinating their children, exposing them to preventable (and in some cases, fatal) diseases such as measles and petussis.
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The Cosmic Voyager
Type: "The Cosmic Voyager is the hippy of conspiracist typology," writes Kay. "He resembles … a 'seeker' – a spiritual omnivore perpetually spiraling out toward the margins of Western cultural and political life. … Since his mythology is vague and labile, he acst as a sort of conspiratorial Zelig, popping up at everything from Truther conventions to quack autism sites." Many get into Eastern mysticism, and all are convinced that reality is not what it seems. Often, the Voyager is a UFO obsessive.
Example: Ken Jenkins. A flower-power type, Jenkins is a California film producer who became the 9/11 Truth Movement's "unofficial multimedia coordinator," says Kay, turning wacky theories into high-gloss video montages and Powerpoint presentations." He sees 9/11 – an "inside job" – as part of a deeper pattern in history that encompasses Pearl Harbor, the assassination of JFK, the Gulf of Tonkin incident, and more.
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The Clinical Conspiracist
Type: "Only a small minority of the [conspiracists] I encountered seeme out-and-out insane," Kay writes. "When clinically insane individuals do take a prominent role in conspiracist movements, it is typically in the early stages, when they can work their own idiosyncratic notions into the movement's foundational mythology." He adds that "their paranoid fantasies are highly personalized narratives of their own construction – typically involving spouses, relatives, landlords, and work colleagues."
Example: L. Ron Hubbard, who worked up the "religion" of Scientology out of his own paranoid obsessions regarding psychiatrists, "suppressive persons," and 75-million-year old intergalactic ghosts.
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The Evangelical Doomsayer
Type: "Conspiracism is sttractive to the Doomsayer," Kay writes "because it organizes all of the world's menacing thrests into one monolithic force — allowing him to reconcilethe bewildering conplexities of the secular world with the good-versus-evil narrative contained in the book of revelation and other religious texts."
Example: Dave Mustaine. The Megadeath frontman found religion when, while recovering from a career-threatening arm injury, he climbed a hill and beheld a faraway cross. After that, he began to work apocalyptic imagery into his Megadeath compositions. Explaining why he titled an album End Game, he said, "As a Christian, I believe [the elites' end game] is one-world government, one-world currency …. It's part of the master plan. … I know that there's going to be a cataclysmic ramping up of these things that we're seeing right now. And it gets worse and worse and we're watching our country disintegrate right now."
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The Firebrand
Type: "Conspiracists of the firebrand type are the easiest ones to spot," Kay writes, "because they are always the noisiest. For the firebrand, conspiracism supplies an ideological pretext to strike shocking, militant political postures, and thereby satisfy his hunger for public attention." Most are in their late teens or early twenties.
Example: Luke Rudkowski. The "street leader" of the Truther movement came to prominence via a viral YouTube video showing him berating noted statesman Zbigniew Brzezinski at a Council on Foreign Relations event: "You are CFR scum," he yells. "You are CFR and New World Order scum. You and David Rockefeller will never have a new world order." Under the banner of a group called We are Change, he goes around other events involving organizations, like the CFR, that conspiracists believe are bent on world domination.
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