In an Ever-Changing, Politically Treacherous World, Conspiracy Theories Offer the Best Answers for Some

BY STEVEN T. JONES

Donal Schneider believed government was out to get him, and eventually it did. Was he paranoid? Was he right? Or both?

We've devoted considerable space in the pages of New Times to analyzing the questionable circumstances of Schneider's death at the hands of sheriff's deputies, but less to the question of whether he was right to fear the government.

Or, more to the point, whether what historian Richard Hofstadter in 1952 dubbed the "paranoid style of political thought" is entirely reasonable given the social conditioning and political observations of the 20th century American.

Schneider devoted most of his life to paranoid political thought and action, the quintessential right-wing conspiracy theorist, a "constitutionalist" of the Timothy McVeigh variety, even if Schneider hadn't made any pre-emptive military strikes against the New World Order.

When McVeigh blew up the federal building in Oklahoma City–on the anniversary of the federal government's fatal assault on David Koresh's compound in Waco, Texas–Schneider said he believed the bombing was actually done by the federal government as a pretext for cracking down on constitutionalists and their citizen militias.

That theory was circulated widely on the Internet, a medium that has exponentially increased the spread of conspiracy theories and other paranoid-style political musings and given many the seeming legitimacy of an "investigative journalism" label.

The Internet has also been the main breeding ground for the two theories explored in this article: that Vince Foster, a high-ranking member of the Clinton administration, didn't commit suicide but was murdered; and that the federal government has been sowing the skies with harmful chemicals, possibly as a prelude to a New World Order takeover or to suppress Y2K-triggered chaos.

Both theories have a number of true believers in San Luis Obispo County, some of whom have devoted considerable time, money, and effort to discovering "the truth."

What sociopolitical conditions have caused those theories to be embraced with such fervor, and what makes such elaborate belief structures seem quite reasonable?

Is it possible our government is spraying us with chemicals without our knowledge in order to carry out some unknown agenda? Yes. Is it possible that Bill Clinton had both Vince Foster and Ron Brown killed because they knew some dark secret? Absolutely.

Is either case likely? No. Have proponents of these theories proven their cases? No. Are there many missing links and logical leaps in both cases? Yes.

They are classic paranoid-style conspiracy theories. But that doesn't in itself make them wrong. At many points during this century the paranoids of this country have been right. Those who thought they were being spied on have later been able to peruse FBI files, confirming their worst fears.

Those who feel they're being controlled by outside forces can point to cases of subliminal advertising and sensory manipulation in places like casinos and shopping malls. Those feeling like human guinea pigs point to the drugs given to black airmen at Tuskegee, the FBI's experiments with LSD, or radiation testing on soldiers.

And those who fear government cover-ups have a long list of examples from which to choose. In the Vietnam War era alone that list includes massacres like My Lai, the secret bombing of Cambodia, government infiltration of legal student groups, myriad revelations from the Pentagon Papers, and President Richard Nixon's escapades, from "dirty tricks" to money laundering to Watergate.

Revelations of misdeeds often prove to be just the onion's first layer, as persistent pursuers of the truth discover even worse inner layers, only to find they still haven't reached the core.

Just as the "third-rate burglary" was peeled away to reveal political sabotage in Watergate, and eventually gross presidential misconduct, so too the paranoid political observer always searches for the deeper truth.

When the New Times investigation of Schneider's death revealed fatal misjudgment by deputies and deliberate deceptions of the public by the Sheriff's Department, Schneider's fellow "patriots" didn't stop there.

Locals like Ritchie Ray Walker and Richard Bastian believe Schneider was intentionally murdered to silence him from speaking the truth, that the deputy was lying in wait for Schneider, carrying out orders to kill him, and that something nefarious happened to the unidentified "mystery witness" who saw it all and knows the truth.

In today's "paranoid style" there are no tragic accidents, no strange ironies, no complex problems with nuanced solutions, no opponents who aren't enemies.

The "paranoid style" certainly isn't limited to politics but carries over into pop culture. Aliens are icons because we want to believe we're connected to something bigger, spawning popular shows like "X-Files" and "Dark Skies" and polls showing most of us believe in extraterrestrials.

And if you don't believe in the conspiracy, then you're either a gullible fool or part of it.

Searching for the Truth

Arroyo Grande resident Suzanne Barton (not her real name) spends much of her time watching the skies. She's convinced that these aren't normal clouds. They just aren't right; clouds just don't behave this way.

Her descriptions transform the clouds into living enemies as they stretch out over the sky, reach out and grab one another, stack on top of each other, crawl in over the horizon, descend upon us, making us ill.

"As you get the eye for it, you'll see it as you look through the pictures," Barton said, quickly flipping through dozens of pictures and pointing out the sinister features of what appear to be normal cirrus clouds (photos that also appear to meteorologist Sharon Graves to be normal cirrus clouds). "Just look over your head on any given day and you'll notice it."

Over the course of the last year, Barton has spent hundreds of hours watching, taken hundreds of pictures of cloud formations, spent hundreds of dollars on film and developing.

What set Barton off on her study of the sky were calls she got from clients–she is a holistic health practitioner–a year ago complaining about frequent illness. Then Barton found websites dealing with "chemical contrails" (like www.contrailconnection.com) and turned her eyes upward.

The "chemical contrail" story says fleets of aircraft are sowing the skies of the United States, Canada, England, and other countries with mysterious, dangerous chemicals that are fanning out into a toxic cloud cover and making people sick.

"As formations of unmarked tanker aircraft continue to crisscross American skies on a mission authorities refuse to disclose, an environmental laboratory has identified an extremely toxic component of the spray drifting over cities and the countryside," began one account, "Hospitals Jammed as Banned Pesticide Sprayed From the Skies," by Canadian journalist and author William Thomas, the most prolific writer on the topic.

The article quotes unidentified "independent sources" using unidentified labs who have isolated one component of the fallout as being the pesticide ethylene dibromide. The article is filled with anecdotal evidence of people seeing strange contrails and then getting sick.

While Thomas doesn't know why it's happening, he speculates that it is some kind of governmental mind-control experiment, or perhaps preparations to spray sedative drugs over populated areas if popular unrest induced by the Y2K computer bug does occur.

"All I know is it's happening, and people are getting sick," Barton said.

Twenty-year-old Ryan Manci is also watching the skies of the South County.

"I started looking up and paying more attention to what was going on," Manci said. "I was thinking they are trying new experiments in weather, but it's going too far, because a lot of people are getting sick."

He began to notice planes leaving contrails with grids or other crossing patterns in the sky, sometimes accompanied by what he calls a crackling sound, "so you could tell they were releasing something."

"They start spraying, and within two hours we have a fog bank. It's weird," he said, noting that shortly thereafter he would begin to have upper respiratory problems. "My body temperature goes up and down. It's weird. I get depressed. I get sick. It's just not right."

(Barton at first agreed to have her name used for this story–in fact came to New Times looking for publicity–but later declined, arguing that her business would be damaged if the article doesn’t portray the contrail theory as fact and presents it with other conspiracy theories.)

After spending up to eight hours a day photographing the skies since January, Barton said she has figured out some patterns and believes the chemicals also play a weather-manipulation role.

"Three weeks ago this past Tuesday the spraying turned into a foglike cap," Barton said. "When that dissipated, it got hot for two days, above seasonally, then it got cold for two days, then it rained, and people got very sick. Upper respiratory, headaches, diarrhea is the main thing that I heard of. Now, that was a very bizarre week. I've had lots of health problems. I was so fatigued I couldn't get out of bed for four weeks."

None of the local sky-watchers professes to know why this is happening.

"That's the only thing I'm stuck on is why and what it is. But I know they're dropping it," Manci said. "I've experienced a lot of weird things since this has gone on."

Barton thinks the government is behind it and speculates that it is experimentation leading up to something even more significant.

"Until they experiment with this stuff they're not going to know about the impacts, because this is global," Barton said.

"It has been said that it has something to do with Y2K and what will eventually be martial law and maybe even slaughter," said "Mary," another Arroyo Grande contrail-watcher. "A lot of people believe there is a Y2K connection for population control."

"It's obvious that this is being done, and there has been testing on the stuff," said Mary’s husband, referring to Thomas' articles.

Told in a phone interview how much time and effort people were putting into watching the skies, Thomas acknowledged there are probably people out there going too far.

"It's very difficult to avoid that, especially in the climate of conspiracy and millennialism," he said.

Even if the central claims have yet to be proven, chemical-contrail theorists have uncovered and publicized real cases of chemicals released into the skies, including releases of GP8 jet fuel in the Pacific Northwest that could cause headaches and respiratory problems among those below.

They have also shined the spotlight on the negative health impacts of certain pesticides sprayed from the air and raised questions and stimulated debate about the wisdom of spraying the pesticide malathion in populated areas.

Barton and her chemical-contrails cohorts weave such revelations–as well as past transgressions of radiation testing and the spraying of Agent Orange on soldiers–into a complex proof that the federal government–nay, governments around the world–are intentionally poisoning the populace.

Into this complex web they weave concerns about weather-manipulation experiments, the plotting to form a repressive One World Government, and Y2K fears of massive social unrest and/or the imposition of martial law after New Year's Eve of this year.

Barton is convinced that the weather this year has been weirder than ever before, that the clouds today are unlike those of years past, that more local people have been getting sick than ever before, and that it is the strange contrails overhead that are making us sick.

Yet each of these four points can be refuted.

Meteorologist Sharon Graves said the weather this year has been fairly typical, without rapid weather changes that couldn't be charted with traditional meteorological gauges like radar. Searching through Barton's photos of clouds, Graves also saw nothing unusual and was able to name all the formations.

Barbara Schwenoha, the county's communicable disease program manager, said it's been a fairly average year for illnesses. And the outbreaks of upper respiratory problems of concern to Barton seem to be viral, Schwenoha said, following typical patterns of contagious disease rather striking a broad swath of citizens who might be susceptible to chemicals in the broader environment.

And Paul Allen of the county's Air Pollution Control District said strong air currents, an inversion layer that hovers around 500 to 1,500 feet up, and air stratified by temperature and pressure differences would prevent chemicals from contrails–which are typically more than 10,000 feet in the air–from settling on the ground below.

"I think it would be highly unlikely that someone would disperse a chemical at 10,000 feet with the intention of it reaching the ground," Allen said.

Yet such evidence does little to crack an intensely held set of beliefs.

"I hear you, and I know what you're saying, and I don't know what to say," Barton said when confronted with this information. "All I can say is I know this isn't right, these clouds are...not...normal," measuring her final three words for emphasis.

Thomas also chooses to de-emphasize evidence that would refute his claims in favor of the anecdotal accounts of true believers and his own nagging sense that something just isn't right.

"I can only say to the skeptics and the scientists that I have numerous reports of people getting sick within 24 hours after seeing this strange aerial activity," Thomas said. "It is certainly not normal. Something is going on."

Yet even Thomas admits he has not established a direct link between chemical contrails and outbreaks of disease, only an anecdotal one. Which begs the question: Are people seeing and feeling what their belief systems would have them see and feel?

Seeds of Discontent

Concern over chemical contrails is the latest manifestation of an age-old fear that someone is trying to poison us, a fear that resonates deep in the ancient part of our souls.

"The panic concern with the malignancy of external, hostile powers and the feeling of helplessness because we cannot stop their intrusions into our bodies produce an acute concern with poisoning. In the Middle Ages, the Jews were periodically accused of poisoning the wells," writes author Eli Sagan in "The Honey and the Hemlock: Democracy and Paranoia in Ancient Athens and Modern America."

The powerful notion of forces colluding against us can be a positive motivator, as the example of the environmental movement attests. And deciphering the plot can be a powerful motivator toward action.

It is this positive potential of paranoia that lies at the heart of author Mark Fenster's book, "Conspiracy Theories: Secrecy and Power in American Culture," released in April.

"On the one hand, conspiracy theory is often characterized as illegitimate, pathological, and a threat to political stability; on the other hand, it seems an entertaining narrative form, a populist expression of a democratic culture, that circulates deep skepticism about the truth of the current political order throughout contemporary culture," Fenster writes.

The politically paranoid these days can easily connect into a community of kindred souls through the Internet, which more than any other factor has allowed for the rapid expansion of conspiracy groups and ideas.

That community reinforces a belief structure with a constant stream of new information and testimonials. The Internet also allows truth-seekers to easily gather bits of new information to theories, arming themselves with more random factoids than ever before.

"The Internet was made for conspiracy theory; it is conspiracy theory; one thing leads to another, always another link leading you deeper into no thing and no place, floating through self-dividing and transmogrifying sites until you are awash in the sheer evidence that the Internet exists. The medium is the message. Theory rules," Stewart writes.

Still, not everyone with a computer falls under the spell of conspiracism. Now and throughout history, researchers say, those who believe come mostly from dissatisfied groups looking for power and for answers to life's complicated problems.

"A survey of conspiracy theories in American life shows that these tend to come disproportionately from two broad groups of people: the politically disaffected and the culturally suspicious," author Daniel Pipes writes in the 1997 book "Conspiracy: How the Paranoid Style Flourishes and Where It Comes From."

That seems to hold true on the Central Coast. Neither Barton and fellow sky-watchers, nor Schneider and the other constitutionalists, nor local Clinton-haters feel government acts in their interests. And all are suspicious of a consumer culture that has marginalized their interests in favor of more trivial pursuits.

Who Dunnit?

"Christopher Ruddy, best known for reporting on the scandals surrounding the deaths of former deputy White House counsel Vincent Foster and Commerce Secretary Ron Brown, will be in Grover Beach Thursday, Nov. 11th," read the press release for the Republican Central Committee of San Luis Obispo County, which hosted the event as a fund-raiser.

Ruddy's work has long been sponsored by such right-wing stalwarts as philanthropist Richard Mellon Scaife and the Hoover Institute. But for the Republican Party to bring Ruddy to town still seemed an unusually overt melding of conspiracism into mainstream politics.

"You'll love it," local GOP spokeswoman Leisa Brug assured me. "He's a total conspiracy theorist."

Ruddy, however, doesn't agree.

"I am not a conspiracy theorist," Ruddy said, before and after speculating that Vince Foster didn't really commit suicide, that Ron Brown was already dead from a gunshot wound when his plane crashed, that TWA Flight 800 was actually downed by an American surface-to-air missile, and that special prosecutor Kenneth Starr's investigation of President Clinton was an elaborate hoax designed to cover up Clinton's complicity in Whitewater and other misdeeds, labeling Starr "Clinton's accomplice."

Ruddy defends his defense against conspiracism by pointing out that he offers no theories. Rather, he tries to dismantle the official version of politically charged events, point to the possible motives of Clinton and other nonconservatives, and let his listeners draw their own conclusions.

Yet he doesn't leave much wiggle room for people to draw anything but conspiracy theory conclusions, as when he described allegedly frantic efforts by Clinton loyalists to remove allegedly incriminating documents from Foster's office.

"They acted like they had a lot to hide, and they did have a lot to hide," Ruddy said, without naming what it was they tried to hide. "One of the reasons I followed this is because I thought if they can get away with this, they can get away with anything."

Still, despite such an obvious implication that what Clinton was getting away with was murder, Ruddy steadfastly shuns the conspiracy theorist label: "Anybody who looks at my work knows I don't have any conspiracy theories"

Yet Ruddy is a bit conspiracy-minded about journalists and authors who have refuted many of his findings, like well-known author Dan Moldea, whose career began with a conspiracy theory book asserting there was a second gunman at Robert Kennedy's assassination, only to publicly retract that allegation later once he discovered evidence refuting his assertion.

"I think he was asked to write that book to refute me," Ruddy said of Moldea.

In fact, Ruddy implies that the entire mainstream media establishment is part of the conspiracy to cover up Clinton's misdeeds, citing as proof a study that claimed 89 percent of the Washington, D.C., press corps voted for Clinton in 1992.

"The press does not represent the broad interests of the American people," Ruddy said, tapping into intense conservative suspicions about the press that go back to the Nixon administration and even earlier.

"The press has failed this country," he continued, prompting a man in the audience who had been nodding vigorously to turn toward me as I took notes, offer an angry scowl, and mumble in my ear as he passed, "Absolutely!"

Although Ruddy spoke to a packed house of as many as 200 people, many said they were there simply to support their party and that they didn't necessarily believe Ruddy. Nonetheless, most found his ideas intriguing.

"It's our culture; we are intrigued by conspiracies," said committee Chairman George Galvan. "Some of it is we're skeptical anyway about what we hear from the media. And there are people who want to believe in certain theories, and that's just natural."

That desire to believe the very worst about Clinton is obviously strongest among his political opponents, just as it's been true throughout the ages. We want to believe the worst about our enemies because it validates our opposition.

One local Republican who believes that Foster and Brown were killed and a number of other anti-Clinton conspiracy theories is Ralph Bush, who arranged the Ruddy speech.

"There truly are some questions that haven't been answered," said Bush, firing through a number of questions raised by Ruddy's book, including why the Park Police investigated the crime, why there was allegedly so little blood at the scene, and why files were removed from Foster's office on the night of his death.

Even though these and many other questions were addressed in subsequent investigations by both the FBI and two special prosecutors (Robert Fiske and Kenneth Starr), all of which concluded Foster killed himself, the true believers want their mystery.

"It would be hard to say Bill Clinton is not involved," said young event attendee Tamas Simon, president of the College Republicans of Cal Poly.

In his rhetoric, Ruddy goes beyond simply raising questions about the circumstances of the deaths of Foster and Brown to cast the fact that they died at all as suspicious.

"How many people do you know who die in plane crashes or gunshot wounds to the head?" he said, with the air of making an important point.

It is this point that perhaps gets the closest to the real core of the paranoid style, this deep-seated belief that there is more going on than we can possibly know, a vague sense that there are no accidents, that behind every significant event is a darker reality.

As with the watchers of clouds and contrails, there is a feeling that this just isn't right.

"Basically, I don't trust government," San Luis Coastal Unified School District board member Sylvia Muscia said of her tendency to believe in conspiracy theories about government. "As I've grown up, I have reluctantly become very skeptical."

Skeptical of government, that is, not of conspiracy theorists. Muscia hosts a talk show on KGLO radio that sometimes features various conspiracy theorists. The day after Ruddy's speech she was to feature someone who believes Russian nuclear weapons are secretly planted throughout the United States, a source she found on Newsmax.com, the website run by Ruddy.

Bush admittedly doesn't like Clinton, but says his doubts that Vince Foster committed suicide are based on something deep inside that rings with doubt.

"Nothing seems to make sense when you look at it," Bush said following Ruddy's presentation.

"...and why were the bottom of his shoes so clean?" Muscia interjected, offering another piece of the puzzle and forming a bemused grin.

The Paranoid Style

There have been a number of recent books analyzing paranoid political thought and conspiracy theories, and almost all of them acknowledge and pay tribute to Hofstadter's pioneering analysis of the phenomenon.

"The typical procedures of the higher paranoid scholarship is to start with such defensible assumptions and with a careful accumulation of facts, or at least of what appear to be facts, and to marshal these facts toward an overwhelming 'proof' of the particular conspiracy that is to be established. It is nothing if not coherent–in fact the paranoid mentality is far more coherent than the real world since it leaves no room for mistakes, failures, or ambiguities.

"What distinguishes the paranoid style is not, then, the absence of verifiable facts, but rather the curious leap in imagination that is always made at some critical point in the recital of events," Hofstadter wrote in "The Paranoid Style in American Politics."

Observing political changes through the cultural paranoia of the Red Scare and rise of Barry Goldwater, and the resulting backlash from the left that was often equally conspiratorially minded, the work of Hofstadter and others of the period is still lauded today by cultural studies practitioners.

"A feeling of persecution is central to the paranoid style, but whereas the clinically paranoid person perceives a world hostile and conspiratorial against him or herself, the spokesperson for the paranoid style finds it directed against a nation, a culture, a way of life whose fate affects not himself alone but millions of others," Hofstadter wrote. "His sense that his political passions are unselfish and patriotic, in fact, goes far to intensity his feeling of righteousness and his moral indignation."

Fast-forward almost 50 years and we see a topsy-turvy world where nothing is as it seems, where the virtual realities of computers and consumerism seem more real than the seemingly tangible illusions of democracy and free will, when the conspiracy against us isn't from communists across the world but from all around us.

"The burgeoning new world order of starkly divided camps where haves and have-nots have become, more simply and efficiently and finally, winners and losers," writes professor and author Kathleen Stewart in "Conspiracy Theory's Worlds." "This coupled with a desire for an Other order of a true US and THEM coming from someplace outside our control. A cultural politics awash in inchoate yet palpable structures of feeling that are themselves peppered with the occasional knowledge (and experience) that everything is interconnected and merging–a seduction, a dreaming, a moving toward and within–coupled with the guilty pang, the moment of terror when something whispers in our ear that the interconnectedness is all controlled by a dark and monolithic Other and we are in it, no exit."

Her essay is part of a book released earlier this year titled, "Paranoia Within Reason: A Casebook on Conspiracy as Explanation," which explores paranoia as a valid form of political thought and analysis.

"Paranoid speculation is at the heart of every theory," writes the book's editor, George E. Marcus, who chairs the Anthropology Department at Rice University.

With that premise in mind, the book looks beyond the destructive tendencies of "paranoia in extremis" to present paranoia as a reasonable starting point for rational thought, or in the case of artist Salvador Dali's Paranoid-Critical Method, as a wellspring of creativity.

More importantly, it analyzes how the rapid cultural changes of the last 50 years and an American political style built on propped-up enemies are "conditions of contemporary life that make the paranoid style and conspiracy theories an eminently reasonable tendency of thought for social actors to embrace."

"Paranoid" and "conspiracy theorist" are clearly words loaded with negative connotations. But if we strip them of such emotional baggage, and realize that we're all a little paranoid and conspiracy-minded, then it becomes more difficult to simply dismiss the truth-seekers among us as delusional.

"Conspiracy theory is a skeptical, paranoid, obsessive practice of scanning for signs and sifting through bits of evidence for the missing link," Stewart writes. "Enter the world of conspiracy theory (as we all do and must) and you enter the world of global systems with missing details."

One Final Theory

There is also one final potential cause and explanation behind those who promote conspiracy theories: deliberate self-interest.

Given the number and popularity of conspiracy theory books out there, the loudest proponents of many theories–including people like Ruddy and Thomas–have a direct financial stake in perpetuating their theories.

Add to that Ruddy's political motivations. His livelihood has come almost entirely from Richard Mellon Scaife and other right-wing activists who would like nothing more than to discredit Clinton and sow the seeds of doubt about politically successful New Democrats.

Throw into that mix the cabal of computer programmers and survivalist companies who are making a fortune off our Y2K concerns, demagogues like Pat Buchanan exacerbating our fears for political gain, religionists who want to scare us back into church, and the media moguls who just like to keep things stirred up to create their audience.

I hate to sound paranoid, but it could be a conspiracy. Æ

Steven T. Jones actually died in 1998 during a freak plane crash in clear weather east of Creston. We said at the time that he had taken a job in Monterey. A few months later we started to get articles, allegedly by him. We don't know who now writes his articles, which arrive at New Times every Friday via an untraceable e-mail address.