Among the Truthers

March 7, 2011
Kay, the managing editor and columnist at Canada's National Post newspaper, delivers an insightful (and slightly scary) exploration of America's conspiracy movements. Focusing primarily on the Truthers (who believe the U.S. government engineered the September 11 attacks)—and to a lesser extent, the Birthers (those who claim President Obama is a foreign-born Muslim), Holocaust deniers, and JKF assassination theorists—he argues that we must take these movements seriously, however outré they may seem, for the disturbing anti-
intellectual trend they epitomize: a "nihilistic distrust of government" and a "rejection of logic and rational discourse." Kay, who spent three years immersing himself in conspiracy culture, traces America's flourishing conspiracism back to Greco-Roman times and explores the technological developments that allow conspiracy theories to flourish: Web sites and message boards where Truthers and Birthers can get news "tailored to their pre-existing obsessions." Kay, although generally a fair-minded conservative, reveals that he isn't immune to conspiracy theories himself: he excoriates the rise of multiculturalism and feminism in the academy for prompting a "reconstruction (and in some cases wholesale invention) of history according to the viewpoint of women, blacks, gays... a project that replaced the historian's once unquestioned goal of objective truth with an explicitly political, Marxist-leaning agenda aimed at empowerment and solidarity-building."

March 1, 2011

An exposé into the secret world of American conspiracy theories, as well as the resulting fallout of a country's inability to discern a common narrative.

National Post (Canada) managing editor Kay's debut explores, and often debunks, the many myths and conspiracies woven into America's cultural fabric. Beginning with the Knights of Templar and working through the rise of the Tea Party Movement, the author's all-encompassing view cracks the door to the unexplained, casting light across the shadowy realm of the past. Yet not all mysteries can be so easily solved, and when discussing the varied interpretations of the JFK assassination, as well as the fluttering of the American flag on a zero-gravity moon, a befuddled Kay can only reply, "The world is a complicated place, and some aspects of even the most heavily scrutinized historical events always will remain fissures in society's intellectual foundations." These complications only increased after 9/11, a moment which Kay cites as a pivotal point in America's ability to believe its own story. The initial murky details of the attacks, coupled with the rise of the Internet age, provided a one-two punch aimed directly at truth. Equally harmful was the "jaded skepticism" with which American viewers began regarding journalists. With so many competing information outlets, stories began to unravel, not unlike a high-stakes game of telephone. The author attributes most of these informational problems to the Internet, "a radical democratization of the conspiracist marketplace of ideas" which provided a framework for crackpot theories and a ready-made audience with no particular oversight. On occasion, Kay teeters dangerously close to the lunacy of which he writes, yet more often than not, his level-headed exploration of these theories—along with the people who perpetuate them—add a much-needed grounding to his work. The author himself as a buoy of truth trapped in a sea of uncertainty—just what the skeptical reader requires.

A well-researched and provocative account of our most baffling conspiracies.

(COPYRIGHT (2011) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

May 1, 2011
This hugely entertaining book takes a hard, critical look at Truthers, Birthers, Holocaust deniers, anti-vaccine activists, Tea Partiers, and other conspiracy-minded groups. The key to understanding these various organizations, the author stresses, is to realize that they are not all nutballs, even if they believe nonsense. Truthers, for example, who claim that the 9/11 terrorist attacks were not what they seemed, have collaborated on the Internet to produce a dense mythology with a professional, even scholarly, gloss. Birthers, while unable to provide any proof that Barack Obama was not born in the U.S., formulate lengthy, internally consistent arguments concerning his nationality. The problem, the author points out, is that many people, hearing what sounds like a plausible argument, accept it without realizing that it is without factual foundation. Kay doesnt adopt the derisive tone of some who write about people whose ideas are outside the mainstream; this isnt a book about weird people and their weird ideas. Its a thought-provoking exploration of the conspiracist subculture that exists just under the surface of American society and its serious, but reparable, cognitive consequences.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2011, American Library Association.)