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A Journey Through America's Growing Conspiracist Underground
HarperCollins
May 2011
On Sale: May 17, 2011
368 pages
ISBN: 0062004816
EAN: 9780062004819
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
From left-wing 9/11 conspiracy theorists to right-wing
Obama-hating "birthers"—a sobering, eyewitness look at how
America's marketplace of ideas is fracturing into a
multitude of tiny, radicalized boutiques—each peddling its
own brand of paranoia Throughout most of our nation's
history, the United States has been bound together by a
shared worldview. But the 9/11 terrorist attacks opened a
rift in the collective national psyche: Increasingly,
Americans are abandoning reality and retreating to
Internet-based fantasy worlds conjured into existence out of
our own fears and prejudices. The most disturbing
symptom of this trend is the 9/11 Truth movement, whose
members believe that Bush administration officials
engineered the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks as a
pretext to launch wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. But these
"Truthers" are merely one segment of a vast conspiracist
subculture that includes many other groups: anti-Obama
extremists who believe their president is actually a
foreign-born Manchurian Candidate seeking to destroy the
United States from within; radical alternative-medicine
advocates who claim that vaccine makers and mainstream
doctors are conspiring to kill large swathes of humanity;
financial neo-populists who have adapted the angry message
of their nineteenth-century forebears to the age of Twitter;
Holocaust deniers; fluoride phobics; obsessive Islamophobes;
and more. For two years journalist Jonathan Kay
immersed himself in this dark subculture, attending
conventions of conspiracy theorists, surfing their
discussion boards, reading their websites, joining their
Facebook groups, and interviewing them in their homes and
offices. He discovered that while many of their theories may
seem harmlessly bizarre, their proliferation has done real
damage to the sense of shared reality that we rely on as a
society. Kay also offers concrete steps that intelligent,
culturally engaged Americans can take to reject conspiracism
and help regain control of the intellectual landscape.
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