Jonathan Kay ’85 Among the Truthers

Alumni NEWS

Jonathan Kay ’85 searches for veritas among the TRUTHERS

By Richard Wills, publications editor

The 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.”

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 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

Jonathan Kay ’85

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Jonathan Kay

past. Now that the book has been published, on the other hand, everything has changed. It would now be impossible for me to go back and interview these people. They’d shun me. Just Google “jonathan kay” and “youtube” and you can see some of the hate-on videos they’ve made about me in the last few months.

Veritas: You didn’t try to assess the credibility of any particular conspiriacist theory, but merely examined the conspiracist phenomenon.

Kay: For the most part, my book is not intended as a catalogue of their debating positions. Nor is the book intended as a rebuttal to the conspiracy theorists’ debating positions. The reason I decided on this is twofold. First, it would have taken hundreds of pages to step readers through this numbing debate in any kind of thorough way. Secondly, it wouldn’t convince dedicated conspiracy theorists anyway, so the only people who might be convinced are people who aren’t conspiracy theorists...and I didn’t want my book to become a recruiting tool for conspiracy theories!

I readily admitted early on in my book that there always is a tiny grain of truth behind every conspiracy theory. For example, The Project for a New American Century is the grain of truth (or one of them, anyway) behind the 9/11 Truth conspiracy theories, because PNAC shows that it really is true that there were plenty of conservative American politicians looking for a pretext to take out Saddam Hussein. That part is true. The far-fetched conspiracy-theory part is when you take those grains of truth and try to grow them by many orders of magnitude until you have something that looks like the plot of a Hollywood movie, with legions of spooks planting bombs in New York skyscrapers and murdering thousands of people.

Veritas: After having met various conspiracists, you describe them in a sympathetic way, as generally affable, educated people. Do you a see a bit of them in each of us?

Kay: Yes—absolutely yes, including me. From doing this project, I’ve become sensitized to the massive degree to which all of us try our best to warp reality so that it comports to our ideology. I see this all the time with, say, free-market conservatives who do their best to pretend that global warming doesn’t exist. These people aren’t conspiracy theorists per se, but they realize that the global warming hypothesis is a death knell to their mantra of unregulated industrial activity, so they subconsciously set up mental filters and tricks that allow them to pretend that global warming is a fraud.

And of course, you see this on the other side of the political spectrum, too: left-wing anti-corporate types who convince themselves that this or that vaccine will kill you, even though the evidence isn’t there.

Basically, every time you get people with strongly held ideological viewpoints, you are going to find people who try to tailor reality to that ideology—either through the selective intake and acceptance of data, or through the wholesale mangling of that data. In extreme situations, such as Truthers and Birthers, these folks become full-fledged conspiracy theorists. But you don’t have to be a Truther or Birther to manifest some of the intellectual trends I am writing about. In Chapter 6 of my book “The Church of Conspiracism”—I point out some of the ways in which conspiracy theories act as ersatz religions for a post-religious age. Conspiracy theories do not supply gods. But they do supply demons, which are just as important for many people— since the presence of demons in our world answers the age-old questions “Where does evil come from?” and “Why do bad things happen to good people?”

Moreover, most of the more ambitious conspiracy theories I analyze in the book owe much, in theme and structure, to the apocalyptic, Manichean narrative contained in the last book of the New Testament: Revelation.

Veritas: In an age when information has become so decentralized and easily manipulated, how can the rightthinking individual recognize the truth when he sees it?

Kay: I don’t purport to show people how they can get to “the truth.” Unlike the people I interviewed, I don’t claim to be any sort of prophet. What I can do, however, is show people how to recognize signs that they are dealing with information and theories that are definitely not true. I do this by showing readers how the basic structure of conspiracy theories has remained constant since the age of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. So I give readers the tools to sniff out this nonsense before they get sucked in by it. In this regard, I like to think, I have shortened their path to the truth, since they now will not have to bother with the many tempting dead ends that conspiracy theories seek to entice them with.

I should add that the book would not have been possible without the education I received at Selwyn House. Byron Harker and Tom Nicoll taught me how to write logically— and by the time I graduated from high school, I was miles ahead of the other writers I came across in CEGEP. That confidence in expressing myself in print never left me, and persisted with me into my years at the National Post. Of equal value was the calculus I learned from Phil Litvack in Grade 11—which put me ahead of the curve in CEGEP, and even in my first-year engineering classes at McGill. Without my degree in metallurgical engineering from McGill, I wouldn’t have had the tools to debunk 9/11 conspiracy theories about the destruction of the Twin Towers (which inevitably revolve around the manner by which the structures’ steel girders and columns collapsed). It always comes back to education. And I had the massive advantage of having gone to one of North America’s finest high schools. ■