Among the Truthers by Jonathan Kay Page B

ether, without any human life on its surface, as it did millions of years ago,” he wrote in Mein Kampf . “And so I believe today that my conduct is in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator. In standing guard against the Jew I am defending the handiwork of the Lord.”
    But conspiracism put down strong roots on the Far Left, too—fed both by Soviet propaganda about the United States, and the inherent nature of radical left-wing ideology, which presents capitalists as scheming parasites seeking to rob the proletariat of the value of their labor. Or as Marx himself put it in Das Kapital : “Within the capitalist system, all methods for raising the social productivity of labour are put into effect at the cost of the individual worker; all means for the development of production undergo a dialectical inversion so that they become means of domination and exploitation of the producers; they distort the worker into a fragment of a man.” (This aspect of Marxism helps explain why former Marxist radicals so easily leap to other militant creeds, such as fascism, Islamism, or—as with WorldNetDaily editor Joseph Farah, profiled later in this book—ultrapopulist conservatism. Notwithstanding the numbing jargon about Hegelian dialectics and such, the real lure of Marxism for these ideologues is its fundamentally conspiracist vision of society.)
    In the United States, where neither Marxism nor fascism ever became truly mass movements, conspiracism followed a different and more complicated pattern—one rooted in three intertwined influences.
    First was America’s religious tradition of apocalyptic millenarianism—a subject discussed in more detail in Chapter 4, in the specific context of Christian conservative conspiracy theories involving Barack Obama. It is a tradition that dates back to New England’s witch hunts and the “Beast-watching” early Puritans, who linked the seven-headed beast of Revelation 13 with the Catholic Church and, later on, the British Empire. Many American conspiracists hitched their appeal to this Revelation-inspired vision of End Times, assigning the various roles of False Prophet, Antichrist, and Satan to popery, the Elders of Zion, the USSR, Nazi Germany, secular humanism, a “New World Order,” or neoconservatism. The United Nations, which the rest of the civilized world tends to regard as a largely benign (if incompetent) organization, is an especially popular target: In the best-selling Left Behind series of novels, which portray earth in the agonies of the Rapture, the Antichrist figure takes the form of UN Secretary General “Nicolae Carpathia” (so-named, social critic Charles Pierce has quipped, “because the authors didn’t think of calling him ‘Evil J. Transylvania’ ”). According to this vision, the political battle for America is in fact a battle for the cosmos itself—with the conspiracists assigning to themselves the role of enlightened Prophets.
    The second major influence on American conspiracism is the country’s unique political culture. From early on in the nation’s history (before it even became a nation, in fact), Americans viewed the United States as a land of economic and political freedom—a place where sturdy, independent yeomen could make their way in the world without much help from government or entanglement with their neighbors. This muscular, independent attitude extended into the realm of philosophy: Born amid the Enlightenment, with its emphasis on individual reason unfettered by authority, America produced a lively culture of homegrown inventors and scientists. As time would tell, it was also more hospitable than the nations of Europe to intellectual outsiders—oddballs, dissidents, heretics, fussy autodidacts, and skeptics—the sort of men who we would now call “cranks.”
    But this worldview sowed the seeds of its own destruction. Unfettered