Alumni NEWS
Jonathan Kay ’85 searches for veritas among the
TRUTHERS By Richard Wills, publications editor
he truthers are out there. And Jonathan Kay ’85 has taken on the task of finding out who they are and what makes them tick. His new book, Among the Truthers, published by HarperCollins, has drawn the attention of mainstream media, as well as the ire of conspiracists who populate the blogosphere. A “truther” is but one type of conspiracist. Simply put, a conspiracist is someone who is convinced that events such as the JFK assassination or the 9/11 attacks were secretly engineered by a sinister cabal of power-brokers seeking world domination. Conspiracists take up many causes, and come in various political stripes, but, as Jonathan writes, they all share common traits. They are proliferating and threatening to dominate American politics. That is why we need to know who they are. And, as Jonathan discovered, to some extent they are us. Jonathan took two years off from his job as managing editor and columnist at the National Post to write Among the Truthers. He travelled the U.S. interviewing conspiracists, attending their conventions and surfing the Internet, poring over their endless rants. Among the Truthers, has been reviewed by scores of publications, including: Macleans, The Economist, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and Rolling Stone. The Dallas Morning News called it “one of the most important books published this year.”
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Veritas, page 10
The book examines the history of conspiracism, the psychology of the conspiracist mind-set, and how technology is responsible for turning a cottage industry into a mass movement. Veritas: What inspired you to take on the project of writing Among the Truthers? Kay: I really didn’t think much about conspiracy theories till a few years back, when I became Managing Editor for Comment at the National Post. Readers would email me all kinds of conspiracy theories, and I would ignore them, assuming they were crazy. But the 9/11 conspiracy theorists were different— they seemed intelligent, well-educated, articulate. They clearly weren’t crazy in the clinical sense. Their bizarre theories were the product of political and intellectual radicalization, not some psychiatric abnormality. It seemed like a fascinating phenomenon—yet no one had written a book about it. I decided to become the first to do so. In the process, I discovered a massive subculture of conspiracism percolating beneath the surface of the respectable mass media, a world that my mainstream-media colleagues were ignoring. Most people just wish and assume that these conspiracy theorists will go away, but their ranks are growing. It’s a problem we need to take seriously. If you look at American political culture, it already has become crippled by rampant conspiracism about 9/11, Barack Obama’s birthplace, health-care “death panels” and the like. Canada will go in the same direction if we’re not careful. Veritas: Does your being a Canadian
Jonathan Kay ’85 put you at an advantage or at a disadvantage in exploring this largely American phenomenon? Kay: I spent about five years of my life in the United States—three years at Yale Law School, and then a few years in New York City as a tax lawyer in the 1990s. But I was always a Canadian at heart. And that helped me regard the pathologies of American political culture at a critical distance. I think the reason an American didn’t write this book is that most Americans, being creatures of the radicalized American political and intellectual milieu—with its Glenn Becks, Noam Chomskys, Ann Coulters and Keith Olbermanns—take that cuckoo culture for granted. As a Canadian, I didn’t take it for granted. I looked upon it in all its weirdness, and decided I had to write about it. Still, I did not set out to mock anybody in my book—no matter how radical their political opinions. Anyone can make fun of conspiracy theorists. I was aiming to understand them. Veritas: Did the fact that you work for a conservative paper like the National Post, make you seem more trustworthy to right-wing conspiracists like the Birthers and some Tea Party types? Kay: The fact that these folks didn’t know anything about me made the book so easy for me to research—I didn’t have to answer awkward questions about my
