We
are all supposedly on journeys to truth. I had a rabbi tell me this
once. And to be an agent of truth — a truth-teller — is a noble thing.
We praise journalists, gadflies, investigators or even politicians that
speak ‘‘truth to power’’ and tell ‘‘hard truths’’ and unearth the
‘‘inconvenient truths’’ that defy official narratives and alter our
destinies.
But
it is not flattering to be called a ‘‘truther.’’ The term originated,
as far as anyone can tell, to characterize people who embraced
alternative explanations for the Sept. 11 attacks. In 2006, The New York
Times published an article
about a convention in Chicago — dubbed the ‘‘International Education
and Strategy Conference for 9/11 Truth’’ — in which alternative theories
about the terrorist attacks were discussed. The report, by Alan Feuer,
included a neutral description of 9/11 truthers, whom he characterized
as a group with a ‘‘rank and file’’ that included ‘‘professors,
chain-saw operators, mothers, engineers, activists, used-book sellers,
pizza deliverymen, college students, a former fringe candidatefor United
States Senate and a longhaired fellow named hummux (pronounced
‘who-mook’) who, on and off, lived in a cave for 15 years.’’
A
truther stereotype was born — and mutated. Today, anyone who subscribes
to or perpetuates less-mainstream or in some cases deeply offensive
versions of accepted scenarios becomes susceptible to the dreaded ‘‘er’’
suffix. Add ‘‘er,’’ dismiss as nuts (rinse and retweet). It suggests a
position on the fringe in the same way that, say, adding ‘‘gate’’
signifies a scandal. So why is it good to tell the truth but bad to be a
truther?
Consider
a recent object lesson of supposed trutherism. It occurred a few weeks
ago in the Republican presidential campaign — and of course involves
Donald, the Trumper. ‘‘When you talk about George Bush,’’ the
then-maybe-front-runner said of the 43rd president during an
interview on Bloomberg TV, ‘‘I mean, say what you want, the World Trade
Center came down during his time.’’
‘‘Hold on,’’ the Bloomberg anchorwoman Stephanie Ruhle said. ‘‘You can’t blame George Bush for that.’’
And
why not? ‘‘He was president, O.K.?’’ Trump countered. ‘‘Blame him or
don’t blame him, but he was president. The World Trade Center came down
during his reign.’’
In
a technical sense, Trump had truth on his side. George W. Bush was, in
fact, the president on Sept. 11, 2001. (As an aside, I was struck by
Trump’s curiously authoritarian use of ‘‘reign’’ to describe the tenure
of an American president.) Trump did not explicitly assign blame to
Bush, or say whether he could have done anything to prevent the attacks.
But by raising the matter of blame, Trump was defying yet another truth
that Republicans had until that point held to be self-evident: that W.
held no culpability for anything that happened on 9/11.
There
was an often-cited warning in the President’s Daily Brief from August
2001 cautioning that Osama bin Laden was ‘‘determined to strike in
U.S.’’ But the general inclination, at least among Republicans, has been
to cut Bush slack on this and credit him with ‘‘keeping America safe.’’
Trump’s remark had Bush’s defenders firing up their umbrage machines.
‘‘How pathetic for @realdonaldtrump to criticize the president for
9/11,’’ Jeb Bush tweeted. ‘‘We were attacked & my brother kept us
safe.’’ Ari Fleischer, a Bush White House press secretary, took it
further, breaking out the heavy er-tillery, telling CNN: ‘‘When Trump
implies that since 9/11 took place on Bush’s watch he is partially
responsible for it, he’s starting to sound like a truther,’’ he said.
‘‘And after all, does Donald Trump also think since Pearl Harbor
happened on F.D.R.’s watch that F.D.R. is responsible?’’
Trump
has always been more associated with ‘‘birthers’’ than ‘‘truthers.’’
‘‘Birther,’’ of course, is the common ‘‘er’’ reserved for those who
believe that President Obama’s birth certificate might be fake, that he
was born outside the United States and that his presidency is therefore
not legitimate. Trump was a vocal proponent of this view in the 2012
presidential campaign, which he made many loud noises about joining but
ultimately did not. His apparent fixation on the cause was enough for
many to consign him to the nativist fringe of the Republican Party, or
so it seemed. It also contributed enough doubt that it compelled Obama
to actually release his long-form birth certificate at a White House
news conference in 2011.
Trump
has largely avoided discussing the Obama birth-certificate issue in
this campaign. He is an avowed nonfan of the word ‘‘birther,’’ which he
told Politico in 2012 was ‘‘a derogatory term, created by a certain
group in the media’’ (he instead called it Obama’s ‘‘place-of-birth
issue’’). But to this point, trutherism in its original 9/11 sense has
never really been Trump’s thing. Fleischer told me that he intentionally
used the word ‘‘truther’’ as an epithet. In a sense, he was
counterpunching in a classically Trumpian style — floating a notion and
letting it hang there to absorb sinister connotations. Trump ‘‘did what
people who want to hang dirty innuendos do, which is Donald Trump
style,’’ Fleischer said. ‘‘He made the allegation that Bush was somehow
to blame, without saying how or why.’’ Fleischer said that Trump did a
similar thing recently when he brought up Ben Carson’s Seventh-day
Adventist faith and discussed it in a way that suggested he was
confused. ‘‘I just don’t know’’ about Seventh-day Adventists, Trump
said, leaving an information vacuum for sinister thoughts to flourish.
Trump,
Fleischer said, was inviting listeners to conflate legitimate questions
of Bush’s handling of pre-9/11 intelligence with more easily dismissed
(or screwball) notions. ‘‘I’m not going to give Donald Trump the benefit
of the doubt about anything he leaves unsaid,’’ he told me. Fleischer
is unaligned in the Republican primary race and says he is not a truther
or a birther or any kind of ‘‘er’’ except for a ‘‘Fleischer’’ — which
he says could refer to someone (like himself) who does not believe
recent studies equating the consumption of certain red meats with an
increased risk of cancer. ‘‘I don’t buy the bacon stories,’’ Fleischer
said. ‘‘That means I’m a Fleischer.’’ Or a ‘‘Flesher.’’
It’s
difficult to pinpoint exactly when ‘‘truther’’ became so readily
weaponized. In debates about previous conspiracy theories, no one used
terms like, say, ‘‘Kennedy assassination truther.’’ No one dismissed as
‘‘Elvis truthers’’ those who believed that Elvis Presley remained alive.
A recent Rawstory.com headline identified Rage Against the Machine’s
bassist, Tim Commerford, as a ‘‘moon-landing truther,’’ although no one
would have used such a term at the time of the actual — or alleged —
moon landing.
But
after that 2006 Times article, truthers were suddenly everywhere.
Subsequent reports — in The Washington Post, Vanity Fair and U.S. News
& World Report — all made reference to 9/11 ‘‘truthers,’’ although
it took a while for the word to acquire its full-on wacko connotation.
In recent years, ‘‘truther’’ has come to have its own totally discrete
constellation of evolving meanings and history. Social media, as it
tends to do, has accelerated the process.
After
NASA recently reported that scientists had found signs of water on
Mars, some skeptics dismissed the news as concocted, in the words of
Rush Limbaugh, to ‘‘help advance their left-wing agenda on this
planet.’’ Newsweek presented these counterarguments under the headline
‘‘Mars Conspiracy ‘Truthers’ React to NASA’s Water Announcement.’’ Vice
recently profiled a ‘‘drought truther’’ who maintained that the
catastrophic lack of rain in California was caused by ‘‘a secret
weather-control operation orchestrated by the Powers That Be, part of a
doomed attempt by government geoengineers to stop global warming.’’
‘‘Stevie Wonder truthers’’ have questioned whether the singer is in fact
blind or is just faking it (for some reason). The foremost Wonder
truther, Bomani Jones of ESPN, cited as evidence a guy who claimed to
have sold Wonder three TVs. Jones later acknowledged to me, in an
interview for this magazine, that his Wonder trutherism was ‘‘a somewhat
inappropriate joke that has taken on a life of its own.’’
You
can’t help wondering how many sectors of trutherism begin similarly —
goofs that spin out of control, to a point at which they are taken
quasi-seriously. The Internet is a supercollider of alternative
interpretations — if not realities — and the people who embrace them.
People then marginalize those views by calling perpetrators truthers.
Things can get very pitched in short order. Every topic — Benghazi,
droughts and Mars — becomes a potential battlefield between information
and misinformation, truth and truthers.
Trutherism
can quickly become stranger than fiction, whatever is which. It becomes
a thing, if not a meme. Our individual journeys to truth play out via
search engine. You long for a less-networked, less-noisy and
less-dismissive community of believers versus skeptics. Or at least I
do. Is it me or did conspiracy theorizing and mythmaking used to be so
much more fun? I miss the Sasquatch and Area 51 people. ‘‘The truth is
out there,’’ as the U.F.O. buffs used to say. And they used to be
‘‘buffs,’’ not ‘‘truthers,’’ in those days of greater innocence and less
dismissiveness, before the truthers were out there, too.
