Kay’s book is half reportage and half evidence. Both halves demonstrate that mistrust in institutions—which aren’t doing the best job of running things right now—is driving a wave of conspiracy-mongering. To a man, the leading 9/11 Truthers that Kay interviews say that they found their obsession because they didn’t trust the government and they sought out information from some samizdat source. …

Look at the 9/11 conspiracy. Some of Kay’s sources have tenuous connections to reality. Most of them got interested in the conspiracy because something else seemed … wrong. As Kay points out, “Trutherism” didn’t really take off until 2003, when it was clear there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. If you were already inclined to think that George W. Bush had been unfairly put into office in 2000, if you had read the Project for a New American Century’s letters from the end of the Clinton years, well, this was enough to drive you nuts.

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Many of these popularizers received their lofty titles from “think tanks” or “institutes” that are run out of somebody’s PO box or den. Almost none of them have credentials or professional experience in the field they’re holding forth on — and the ones that do have relevant qualifications are more often than not regarded as embarrassments by their colleagues. And so it happens that David Ray Griffin, the leading author of books on the 9/11 conspiracy, isn’t an aviation expert, physicist, structural engineer, or authority on terrorism; he’s a retired theology professor who asks his readers to take a lot on faith.

Despite the lack of academic or professional cred (or perhaps because of it), the folks who promote conspiracy theories go overboard to put a thick veneer of scholarship on their claims. Books and essays are ostentatiously footnoted; but the references typically link back to even more obscure conspiracy publications with even flimsier evidence — or else to other works written by the same author, in a self-reinforcing loop. Some theorists use scientific jargon to dazzle the crowd and obfuscate weaknesses in their story; others borrow terms of art from the intelligence trade, giving the impression that they’re getting their data from sources on the inside who know what’s really going on.

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