It Doesn’t Make Sense

It was a cloudless September day on the Manhattan skyline. The Twin Towers stood, sturdy and dependable, guarding the world’s most important island like a pair of sentinels. That morning, 2606 people had gone about their daily business, filling their coffee mugs, greeting their coworkers, flicking on their computers.

It was still yawning hour, 8:45 a.m., when a deep rumble filled the sky, growing increasingly louder. A Boeing 767, on a wild flight, bore its way through Manhattan’s horizon. Heads flew skyward as the aircraft, flying far too low, drew uncomfortably close to the North Tower. Hands flew to mouths and screams pierced the air as the unthinkable occurred: a massive collision, ripping a lethal hole through the middle of the stately column, releasing billowing clouds loaded with flaming debris.

Seventeen minutes later. The fear-crazed observers had hardly had time to re-gather their wits, when another flying nightmare barrelled through the air, punching a jagged hole through the corner of the South Tower, plunging into one side, but disconcertingly, not emerging from the other.

A terrifying hour passed. But the scene was only poised to get worse. The South Tower suddenly began to collapse into itself, stirring up a dust tsunami which raged through the surrounding streets. People ran frantically ahead of the rapid, all-engulfing beast, coughing and choking on the dust- infused air.

That night, thousands of spouses and children waited in vain for their loved ones to return home. When reality sunk in, after the horror and the tears, people demanded answers. The seething anger, the vice-like pain was funnelled into one quest: “Who did it?!”

A group of Al Qaeda terrorists wielding knives, mace, and pepper spray seemed a pitiable excuse of an explanation. How could a small gang of terrorists be responsible for such colossal, far-reaching destruction?

Other, more cynical explanations, emerged:

“The planes didn’t bring the towers down. They remained standing long after the aircraft had disappeared inside. It was a series of planned detonations that were triggered off afterward by the US government.”

“I saw a couple of Israelis happily filming the smoking skyline. They didn’t look shocked at all. They must have been Mossad agents who knew that this was coming.”

“It was obviously an inside job.”

“The Pakistani ISI (Inter-Services Intelligence) financed the attacks.”

“The Saudi Royal Family provided material and financial support to the hijackers. The Bush Administration covered it up.”

“There were no planes, there were no hijackers… I know, I know, I’m out of the mainstream, but that’s the way it is. The only explanation is that they were missiles surrounded by holograms made to look like planes.”

“9/11 was perpetrated by a disparate variety of banking, corporate, globalization, and military interests for the purpose of creating a globalist government.”

“It wasn’t a commercial jet. It was a military plane. I’ll prove it — it had no windows.”

In 2002, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) began an investigation into the collapse of the World Trade Center. Their conclusions were clear: There were no planned demolitions, there were no hologrammed missiles. Al Qaeda was clearly responsible and the intelligence agencies knew the names of the terrorists. The flight numbers were empirically established so none of the aircraft could have belonged to the military.

Among experts, the basic facts have not been in dispute for years. Why, then, are there still people out there who believe some kind of conspiracy theory connected to 9/11?

“A conspiracy theory is any kind of unevidenced idea that people believe because it presents a better story than the one that they’re hearing,” Rothschild explains. “You get major events like the Kennedy assassination and 9/11, they create conspiracy theories because we look at them and they are so outsized and world-changing, that we can’t believe that they happened the way that they’re being presented to us.”

In the same way that people simply can’t believe that it was just a group of hijackers with boxcutters who were behind the collapse of the Twin Towers, it’s difficult to believe that a national icon like JFK could have been snuffed out by a lone wolf named Lee Harvey Oswald. The FBI, the Secret Service, the Italian Mafia, the Corsican drug trade, the Majestic 12 UFO investigation committee, the KGB, NASA, Fidel Castro, Cuban dissidents, Vice President Lyndon Johnson, not to mention Jackie Kennedy, are a sampling of the suspects incriminated in numerous Kennedy conspiracy theory books that have come out in the nearly 60 years since the murder.

On the other side of the ocean, on the 10th anniversary of the 1995 Rabin assassination, Yediot Ahronot published a survey showing that close to half of all Israeli Jews don’t believe the government’s version of the event (that Rabin was assassinated by lone shooter Yigal Amir), and that the government had been lying to the public about the circumstances of Rabin’s demise.

Rothschild believes conspiracy theories are embraced because of the primordial human need to make sense of events. People need to identify patterns or a root cause. People need the security of being able to explain things, and the comfort derived from the knowledge that we are not helplessly buffeted by inexplicable series of occurrences. “People believe in conspiracy theories for a reason, and not necessarily because they are crazy or there is something wrong with them,” Rothschild asserts.

Blame It on the Jews

People don’t only turn to conspiracy theories when there is mistrust on a macro scale. When their own lives are not turning out the way they want, they often find targets that feed on suspicion. Sick? Blame it on Big Pharma, a multi-billion-dollar industry that sells you meds with side-effects that are really killing you, instead of advocating for natural, cheaper cures. Or maybe it’s those chemtrails, the supposed dangerous chemical distribution in the atmosphere by airplanes as they leave a thick white line across the sky. Your investment went belly-up? Accuse George Soros for taking over the world’s wealth and not giving the little guy a chance to make it big. Family dissent? Point a finger to the “lizard men” who have reportedly assumed human form and infiltrated every level of society, trying to harness the energy of the human race to aid them in an interplanetary conflict. Generally unhappy? Try the Jews, everyone blames them for something, from mixing blood into their matzos, to triggering both world wars.

“In fact,” Rothschild admits, “nearly all conspiracy theories have anti-Semitic overtones.” That’s because the biggest “fault” of Jews in the eyes of anti-Semites is that they are in possession of considerable wealth, power, and influence and use it to exercise undue control over democratic governments, international organizations, financial institutions, and media corporations.

Long before modern-day conspiracy theories, Jews have been blamed for a whole range of seemingly inexplicable events, such as the bubonic plague that killed half of Europe’s population in 1348–1349, or the French Revolution that overthrew the traditional European order in the years after 1789 — suffering massacres and pogroms as a result.

One of the most notorious anti-Semitic tracts was the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, supposedly the minutes of a secret meeting of Jewish wise men who were plotting the overthrow of civilization. It’s been translated into many languages since it first emerged in 1918, reprinted dozens of times, sold millions of copies, and was Hitler’s inspiration to carry out the Holocaust — even though just a year after it was published it was revealed to be a concoction of paragraphs written in Russian and lifted from several French and German novels. Yet the contents of the document were, in the eyes of the world, less important than its claim to provide authentic evidence of a Jewish world conspiracy.

While the idea of a Jewish world conspiracy was around long before the Protocols, the idea has survived in various forms to the present day. According to Dr. Richard Evans, professor emeritus of history at the University of Cambridge, the idea repeats itself in QAnon, whose adherents believe that a secret cabal of leading Democrats, liberals, and Hollywood actors is kidnapping children and subjecting them to various forms of abuse, including the extraction of adrenaline from their bodies — an obvious rehash of the medieval “blood libel.”

Some conspiracists believe the Rothschild Jewish banking dynasty is behind the world takeover, aided by Hungarian-Jewish financier George Soros (although his own connection to Judaism is tenuous — none of his three wives were Jewish, and neither are his five children); and anti-Semitism emerged at a violent “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017, as part of the “Great Replacement Theory,” a belief according to which the white race in America is being driven out by racial minorities. The demonstrators, however, also chanted, “Jews will not replace us!”

And, says Evans, anti-Semitism is one component among those who support the narrative that the coronavirus vaccines are a nefarious plot. A recent study of several dozens of these groups found anti-Semitic conspiracy theories in a vast majority of them, from paranoid fantasies of a Jewish plot to destroy the economy by spreading the virus, to using the vaccine to destroy the fertility of the “white race.”

One Little Clip

While conspiracy theories aren’t a product of the Internet, technology has turbocharged them on three fronts: speed of spread, ease of visibility, and virtual community.

“You don’t have to listen to the right radio show in the middle of the night, you don’t have to go to the right weird bookstore or the gun show to get the new anti-Clinton video,” Rothchild says. Social media enables people to instantly share content with millions. E-books and dedicated sites bulging with regular updates are just a click away. YouTube offers an endless plethora of “authorities” each with their own carefully crafted channel of tutorials, and linked online market places are stocked with related ephemera. The darker side of the World Wide Web, message boards like 4chan, 8chan, and 8kun are places where every bigoted, prejudiced chauvinist is handed a soapbox from where he can wield wide-ranging influence.

While conspiracy theories in the past might have originated with a clandestine meeting, a speech, a published leaflet or book, many of the modern conspiracy theories begin with a single videoclip or post. Still, the general concepts have remained: An evil cabal of string-pullers who are directing world events from behind the scenes.

As people have exchanged face-to-face chats for their Twitter accounts and real-life relationships fade away, many are left feeling disconnected and hungrily surf the web for new friends. Virtual communities spring up in cyber space, giving people the feeling that they are not alone and that their beliefs are legitimate. In their own way, conspiracy theory communities are intensely alluring. New recruits find not only that warm feeling of being part of a greater whole, but also a sense of mission. There is nothing headier than uniting against a common foe, a foe whom the group have already verbally tarred and feathered. Blasting evil on social media gives users the false sensation that they are achieving great things and really making a difference.

Jadeja, who became disillusioned with QAnon after two and a half years of allowing the theory to dominate his every waking moment, said, “This is an existential battle between good and evil that these people think they’re fighting.” He ruefully admitted that he used to think the same thing.

Many conspiracy theories also offer “secret knowledge,” dazzling new recruits with the feeling that they have joined an animated, pulsing group of people who are awake to the truth, while the rest of the world slumbers in oblivion. This is intoxicating and addictive, and theorists come to devote all of their waking hours to increasing their knowledge and understanding of the new set of ideas.

Conspiracy theories can prove to be great ego boosters, too. Subscribers feel important. They are “privy to secrets” that other people don’t have.

Leila Hay, a 19-year-old from Hull, England, stumbled on QAnon during the first UK lockdown and spent six miserable months under its spell, reading and watching the endless online QAnon material. She would save QAnon pictures and videos to her phone to serve as a constant reminder of “what was going on.”

“You feel like you have been exposed to a new world that no one else knows about,” she said. “It makes you feel like you are important, like you are unique and special.”

There are also feel-good opportunities built into the internal dynamics of the conspiracy community. Individuals rise to prominence based on their “expertise” or the tone or extremism of their posts.

QAnon is particularly prone to the rise of community celebrities, given the vagueness of Q’s posts. Members with genuine-sounding interpretations swiftly rise in popularity. “There’d be a lot of YouTube and Reddit mini-celebrities within the community that would be like the anointed decrypter for that point in time,” Jadeja related.

People with little success in life outside of their computer screen may suddenly find that they have millions of social media followers and an eye-rubbing number of “likes.”

Louise Hampton was a low-level National Health Service (NHS) employee. She was one of the voices behind the non-emergency government healthline “111,” where she would walk callers through a verbal triage system, identifying their ailment and sending them on to the service that would address it. She is now a conspiracy theorist who professes that the corona pandemic was a hoax. In a post on her Facebook page, which has more than 12,000 followers, she writes: “We will NOT be locked down, Vaccinated, Chipped, or Traced!!!! Furlough extended until March… come on people, this ain’t ending anytime soon!!!!”

(Hampton wasn’t alone in the hysteria surrounding the pandemic. Some of the promoted conspiracy ideas — that the lockdowns and economic collapse were part of a plot to hurt Trump’s re-election chances and gain leftist power, and that the media elites were cheering the death toll — would make their way onto Fox News and other mainstream outlets and become an accepted narrative among much of the population.)

Hampton was invited to join a podcast with fellow anti-maskers — fringe elements also known to espouse the claimed carcinogenic nature of 5G and the dangers of the vaccine. Reveling in the attention, she smiled as she was asked, “How is superstardom treating you?”

She replied that she was “overwhelmed.”

In her mind, she had come a long way from being an anonymous NHS lackey.

Jadeja relates that when QAnon had him in its grasp, the conspiracy theory was all he wanted to talk about. Life offline became increasingly complicated. His friends no longer seemed relevant.

“No one believes you. No one wants to talk to you about it… You sound like the homeless guy on the street yelling about Judgment Day,” Jadeja said.

“I think superficially it did seem like QAnon gave me comfort,” he added. “I didn’t realize the nefarious kind of impact it was having on me because it was very insidious how it slowly disconnected me from reality.”

Melissa Rein owns a PR firm named The Brand Consortium. After the pandemic began, it didn’t take long for her to realize that COVID had put her business on the rocks. With a sudden infusion of time on her hands, trying desperately to distract her mind from worries about the future, she began “clicking around.”

She soon received links from all sorts of people. “I looked at everything and somewhere along the way, I clicked my way into the algorithm that pulled me into the center of QAnon,” she related.

Online, she assumed a new persona: “QAnon Spokesperson.”

“You think everyone is lying to you, every day is Judgment Day, and you are living an apocalyptic nightmare. It’s a sad, lonely place,” Rein told The Sun Online. “It didn’t take long for me to become fully immersed it in it. I would spend six to eight hours a day just doom-scrolling on my couch. I’m a type A, very busy person normally, but as I had nothing going on workwise, and I was dealing with one terrible bit of news after the other, the depression, the anxiety, and the fear set in.”

QAnon left her lonely, isolated and paranoid. She lost almost 10 pounds and began to self-neglect.

“I was consuming information all hours of the day, I wasn’t eating, I wasn’t sleeping well, and when I did sleep, I would have horrific recurring nightmares where I would wake up gasping for air,” Rein admitted. “I became increasingly mentally unhinged and angry as time went on.”

When Leila Hay was engaged in QAnon, she became withdrawn from her family, abandoned her hobbies of listening to music and watching movies and instead spent hours absorbing QAnon rhetoric. “It is not a normal conspiracy theory, it consumes your life like a religion,” Leila revealed.

“I lost a lot of myself, I almost forgot who I was as my whole personality was consumed by QAnon… I felt I wasn’t my own person anymore, I was just developed around this conspiracy theory. I dropped my identity so I could focus on QAnon.”

Hay succeeded in freeing herself from OAnon’s grasp when she suddenly saw how it was wrecking her life. “The world is dark enough — but with QAnon, everything is worse than you could possibly imagine,” she said.

Hampton, however, never left. She quit her job at Care UK, and spends her time disseminating disputed claims via social media. She tours COVID-19 testing sites, wearing no protection, trying to prove that the pandemic is a sham based on how empty they are. She published a video clip where she brandished her NHS badge and a certificate signed by a Care UK manager that thanked her for making a difference to patients.

“Apparently, I worked really hard during COVID,” she sneered. She claimed that really, she had done no work at all “because our service was dead. We weren’t getting the calls. It was dead. COVID is a load of nonsense.” [Care UK indicated a 400% rise in calls during the pandemic.]

Wired

“I think there are some people who spread conspiracy theories without necessarily believing in them or do it for a financial motive,” Rothschild reveals. “But generally speaking, I think a lot of these promoters, even going back centuries, really do believe it. You can’t spend that much time pushing something out to the world and do it only as some sort of cynical, money-making operation.”

There are others, he says, who leap onto the bandwagon for the financial or power perks, but after a while they come to believe it.

“It starts to rewire your brain,” Rothschild says. “It changes the way you process information. It changes what information you look at, you stop interacting with anything that doesn’t enforce the view you have begun to believe.” Believers begin a walling-off process, constructing a divide between them and anything which provokes disagreement. Believers of conspiracy theories, far from being open-minded, come as blinkered as you can get.

Once the brain is “wired” by one conspiracy theory, the believer is far more likely to subscribe to another. If you believe that 5G Internet is a health risk, you might also believe that Bill Gates is a genocidal maniac. And if you believe that, Rothschild explains, you probably believe that everything he advocates, such as vaccines, are unsafe. “That first conspiracy theory really opens the gates to a way of thinking that is just generally distrustful.”

What If It’s True?

When so many people buy into a certain narrative, the results can be catastrophic, as the world saw with the rush on the Capitol on January 6. And sometimes, the fallout can ruin people’s lives.

That’s what happened to Lenny Pozner, whose six-year-old son Noah was one of 20 children killed by a crazed gunman at Sandy Hook elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut in December 2012. For the last eight years, Pozner has been harassed and threatened by the “hoaxers,” those conspiracy theorists — egged on by Alex Jones and Infowars — who maintain that the shooting at the elementary school never happened. The 20 kids who died were “crisis actors” and the tragedy was a con, staged by the gun control lobby and others. Noah had never even existed: He was a construct of Photoshop.

When Lenny Pozner started to fight back, the death threats increased as well. He’s moved houses multiple times, has deliveries sent to a separate address, and has rented multiple postal boxes as decoys.

Meanwhile, he’s suing Jones and Infowars for defamation, and has created an organization that forces moderators to delete posts that infringe on others’ civil rights.

“There is just no more truth, there is just what’s trending on Twitter,” he says. “Used to be, you had to burn books to keep people from finding out the truth, now you just have to push it to page 20 of a Google search.”

The problem with discounting all conspiracy theories as the figment of some creative imagination or a more insidious agenda is that although the final narrative is often outrageous, there is often some kernel of truth to the idea. And over the years, there have been some embarrassing government moments when some of those theories were actually proven to be true, as many secret documents have over the years been declassified.

In 1996, for example, journalist Gary Webb uncovered something that many suspected: international drug trafficking could only be possible if organizations like the CIA partook in it. Apparently, the intelligence agency and other government agencies knew all the goings-on of the international drug market and actively participated in trafficking and flooding the slums of Latin America with crack from Los Angeles to finance paramilitary groups fighting to overthrow the Sandinista government in Nicaragua.

And other declassified documents embarrassingly show how, as a strategy against Cuba in the early 1960s, the US was planning to attack its own citizens in Florida, creating a fake Communist Cuba terror campaign in the Miami area and in other Florida cities, with such actions as sinking a boatload of Cubans en route to Florida and detonating a few bombs in carefully chosen spots.

Still, it’s ironic. Many of those most prone to believing conspiracy theories consider themselves as holy warriors fighting against corrupt and powerful forces. They share a hatred of mainstream elites and don’t trust what they consider the agenda-driven stories reported in the media. Yet they aren’t some wacky insignificant fringe anymore, but color every major event where there’s a crack in the veneer: the shooting down of airliners, the JFK assassination, the moon landing, 9/11, the killing of Osama Bin Laden, the 2020 election, COVID. Starved for real answers, will they discover the truth, or instead get sucked into a virtual community more insidious that they ever imagined?

The Scapegoat

One reason people latch onto a conspiracy theory is because they need a scapegoat. The famous Rothschild banking family has been accused of involvement in all the major calamities of the last few centuries. According to the narrative, driven by an insatiable desire for money, the Rothschilds have purportedly assassinated presidents, triggered every war since the 1800s so that they could finance both sides, caused the Holocaust, and engineered the creation of the State of Israel.

Brian Dunning, author, producer, and conspiracy theory debunker, traces the roots of the Rothschild family, and explains why they have become international scapegoats. The founder of the dynasty, Mayer Amschel Rothschild was born to a poverty-stricken family. When he was old enough to apprentice, he went to work in a small Hamburg bank and mastered the trade. At 19, he returned home to Frankfurt and opened his own small financial institution. Besides for using his inborn charisma, energy, and intelligence to the greatest advantage, he was careful to hobnob with the privileged class, nurturing contacts who would make him rich. By the time he was 40, he was dealing with the Elector of Hesse, the Landgrave Wilhelm — one of an exclusive group of nobles who were authorized to elect the next Emperor. When Wilhelm inherited his father’s vast fortune, Mayer Amschel suddenly had the resources to conduct large, international business deals.

It was about then that the Rothschild name began to be associated with financing wars. It didn’t help that Mayer Amschel had ingeniously installed all of his five sons in different centers of world finance: Naples, London, Paris, Vienna, and Frankfurt, which led to theories that they were manipulating international policies between them.

The biggest contributor to the pseudohistory and hyperbole surrounding everything Rothschild is the famous tale in which Wilhelm handed Mayer Amschel his entire fortune for safekeeping as he fled Napoleon’s advance. Ostensibly, Mayer Amschel concealed the stash by sending it to his son Nathan in London. The London Rothschild office loaned it to the British crown, financing the British armies fighting Napoleon in Spain and Portugal in the Peninsular War.

The truth is a mere shadow of the alleged drama. In fact, all that Wilhelm entrusted to Mayer Amschel were some vital documents. It was old news that Nathan managed the bulk of Wilhelm’s money, having already invested the lion’s share with the British Crown. Wilhelm was well satisfied with the move — his own father had originally earned much of that wealth by financing Britain’s war on the American colonies some decades earlier.

The only germ of truth in the unspeakable speculation that the Rothschild family financially supported the Nazi Regime is the huge wealth that they had to leave behind when fleeing Germany. This, of course, was appropriated by the Third Reich.

By 1948, when the state of Israel was declared, the Rothschild family was no longer a single unified unit. Hundreds of financial institutions were likely involved in the formation of the state, some were Rothschild banks, more were not. “It is this twisting and spinning of ordinary events into dark powerful deeds that characterizes much of the Rothschild conspiracy claims,” Dunning explains.

—Rachel Ginsberg contributed to this report

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 854)