With “Snowmageddon” upon us in the Northeast, and 20+ inches of snow on the ground, I’ve had a couple days to spend inside. Needless to say, being a Twitter addict, I spent a lot of my time keeping up on the latest tweets. Today’s big event this morning was the revelation that Debra Medina, a candidate running for governor in Texas, is potentially a 9/11 “truther”. This came to light during an interview on the Glenn Beck show, and while Medina did not actually admit to being a truther, she certainly left the door open and gave a very unsatisfactory answer – essentially, that, nine years after the fact, she still did not have all the facts and couldn’t make a determination about what happened that day.
Of course this triggered the usual folks calling in to defend her, and trutherism in general. One caller said that not voting for someone because they believe in this conspiracy is like not voting for someone because they are pro-choice. I’d say believing that the federal government deliberately murdered thousands of Americans on 9/11 is in a bit of a different class. To actually accept such a proposition, you’d have to believe in a widespread conspiracy that stretches over thousands of people, nine years, and all levels of government. To put it one way… that’s pretty damn insane. Going beyond the sheer irrationality of trutherism, it also requires one to believe that the government is not just incompetent or corrupt, but damn near evil. A government that would commit and cover up 9/11 is a government that is not worthy of any support, and must instead be actively fought as a direct threat to life and limb. To summarize, being a truther means you are divorced from reality, and in some cases, you could be actually dangerous. It is not something to take in stride.
Unfortunately, this incident has once again brought up the horrible tendency of libertarians, and especially those that support Ron Paul, to believe in all manner of nutty conspiracies. I say this with sadness as I agree with Ron Paul on many things and consider myself, largely, a libertarian. In my mind, birthers are in much the same boat in terms of being logic-challenged, irrational people. While 9/11 trutherism is certainly worse than birtherism in many ways, both are pure and simple conspiracy theories – they are beliefs in massive, secretive plots involving a huge number of people. Both rely on disproven and often ridiculous claims that run contrary to all available evidence and scientific fact. And both must be actively fought and expunged from any reasonable, well-intentioned movement. They are like cancers that will only metastasize and grow if left to fester.
All of these conspiracy nuts only serve to give the rest of us a bad name. There are many libertarian-leaning folks who don’t believe George Bush or the Jews are behind 9/11, or that 40 years ago some amazingly predictive folks saw to cover up Barack Obama’s place of birth. There are many of use who actually just believe that a small government is best, that the free market is dynamic and transformative, and that individual liberty is important to defend. Every time some nut goes off on some crazy tangent, it gives our enemies fodder to embarrass us and combat the legitimacy of the entire movement. And the sad fact is, I think truthers and birthers are (hopefully) only a small percentage – they are just the most radical and vocal. The rest of us, AKA the sane ones, need to get these people straight or get rid of them. If we don’t, we risk letting a few crazies sabotage the whole thing. And that would be a tragedy of massive proportions.