My Dad, the Famous Conspiracy Theorist
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My Dad, the Famous Conspiracy Theorist

How it feels when your dad becomes one of the internet's most famous truthers.

This post was originally published on Broadly Germany.

For ten years, my father has run one of the largest and most influential German-language conspiracy theory blogs in the world. Alles Schall und Rauch (German for "All Smoke and Mirrors") averages 50,000 hits a day. According to site analytics, over 180 million people have logged on since 2007. The platform serves as an entry level forum to the truther scene: It publishes daily articles about a wide range of current events, like the theory that the EgyptAir plane involved in a recent crash was shot down by the Israeli military.

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There's even a dedicated page for newcomers to learn the truther ABCs—false flag operations related to 9/11, climate change denial, the New World Order, chemtrails—so they can enlighten themselves and contribute to online discussion. Under the pseudonym "Freeman," my dad set himself the goal of leading us unknowing sleepwalkers, enslaved by a clandestine elite, into the light. And it would be totally possible to dismiss him as your average tinfoil hat wearer. But it's just not as easy as that.

See, my father is one of the most intelligent people I know. He's extremely well-read and has an answer to every question you can think of. This especially impressed me when I was a child, and I was able to listen to him for hours on end. At the dinner table, he often explained the theory of relativity or the infiniteness of the universe to me and my siblings with an ease I've never experienced with anyone else. He constantly encouraged us to use our brains and question everything. Friends and acquaintances alike were mesmerized by his vivid, charming way of speaking.

He'd never admit it, but my father clearly wasn't doing well.

That made it easy to forgive his frequent, spontaneous outbursts of rage. To describe my dad as "difficult" would be somewhat of an understatement. When I was little, trivial problems—like me spilling milk out of the carton or arguing with my brothers—made him hit the roof. Red-faced with anger, he'd threaten to clip us round the ears until we snivelingly promised to behave. When I was a teen, I'd always size up the situation when I came home: If he was in a good mood, I could do as I pleased. Otherwise, I'd stay in my room to avoid the risk of a beating.

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He didn't have an easy childhood. Born in Buenos Aires and raised in Australia, my grandfather dragged him halfway round the world with him. Ignored by his mother and unloved by his stepmother, he came to Europe on his own by ship at the age of 19. There, he met my mother and set up a small but successful software company. He probably never imagined that he would one day become a leading figure in the conspiracy theory scene.

My first memory of his descent into obsession was 9/11. As the World Trade Center fell, my father was in his dressing gown, manically hopping through the various TV news channels. He found the official explanations offered by the US government maddeningly inconsistent. September 11 was a turning point for him—as it was for many conspiracy theorists. He begun collecting and collating information, looking for evidence of something more.

I was 12 years old, and my parents' marriage was already in ruins. Two years later, my mother had had enough of my father's fits of rage. She made her getaway, leaving him and us children behind. She did try to get us to join her, but my father did everything he could to stop this—even playing us off against her.

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Looking back, it seems logical to link the start of his blog with his separation from my mother. He'd never admit it, but my father clearly wasn't doing well. He'd often withdraw to his office until after midnight, and he let himself go physically. With dark bags under his eyes and noticeably thinner, unkempt hair, he tried to provide some kind of normal daily routine for us. But what he got up to before and after meal times was a total mystery. Things hadn't been going well with his software company; the unpaid invoices, which he awkwardly ignored, were piling up on the kitchen table.

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Three years later, he told me he had been working on a project for a long time. It didn't particularly interest me at the time, so I didn't ask any questions. But as I grew older, I began to become interested in politics and social issues. By the time I finished my job apprenticeship at the age of 19, my father had made a name for himself in the truther scene.

He sat me down next to him in front of his computer and we went through articles on his blog together. Gesticulating frantically, he spoke to me about chemtrails, the New World Order, and "climate hysteria." I gratefully soaked it all up. I didn't really understand it all, but I was so captivated that it wasn't long before I was spending long nights researching obscure theories on the internet.

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Soon my father asked me to help him with different events. In Germany, truther meet-ups usually happen in remote farmhouses. There's always barbequed sausages and beer on offer, and everything has the semblance of a cosy family get-together. Around two to three hundred people would attend these events. Whether they were in work or on welfare, one thing remained constant: the majority were men. Women were mostly brought along as window dressing; they stood silently as their male companions spoke. Occasionally, they'd nod their agreement.

At the time, the gatherings were mainly about how to liberate yourself from the system. People suggested proposals for self-sufficient communes, and my dad—who had fitted out an emergency storeroom in his cellar—served as a shining example. "Tobacco and razor blades," he said confidently, "will be the most important tradable goods when they cut off supplies out there." An awestruck murmur went through the crowd.

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He said that people who didn't believe that it was possible to change things were stupid and cowardly. According to him, you had to make sacrifices if you didn't want to be a slave to the New World Order. For truthers, the NWO is a plan from a secretive power elite—like the Rothschild family—in order to exploit the world's population, play them for fools, and ultimately decimate them, either by making them gay or by spreading diseases through vaccination pgrograms. I never figured out why the Rothschilds would hatch such an evil plot, but I told myself I was probably just too lazy to pore over the relevant literature. After all, as Freeman's daughter, I was already able to impress even seasoned truthers with my half-baked knowledge.

It felt good to be his kid. Attention was lavished on me; people envied me for having "such a great father." They hung on Freeman's every word, and mine too—probably because, as a woman, I was an exception in the local scene. I shared a sense of smug arrogance with these people; we knew something all the zombies in the mainstream world didn't. We also had a collective hatred of all the enemies of the truth: the mass media, Zionists, banks and, of course, the USA. I was constantly angry. Whenever I saw someone reading a free newspaper on the train, I wanted to rip it out of their hands and tell them that they were being fed bullshit.

Anti-Semitism is half-openly practiced in the truther scene. There are hardliners who aren't afraid of denying the Holocaust, and there are those who only rant about evil Zionists when they believe they are among friends. Once, I was angry with my father because he wouldn't give me money to go to a music festival, and complained to one of his friends from the scene. He told me that I should rather direct my anger towards the real evil of the world: the Jews. My father is very careful about statements like these. Then again, he did mention once that he deliberately didn't choose Jewish names for me and my brothers.

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The break with my father came a few years later. I'd moved out and felt massively liberated and independent. I'd been in therapy for a year for an anxiety disorder, and my condition markedly improved after leaving home. For a while, I shrugged off any attempts my father made to get in contact. I began to reorganize my life, had a decent job, and was making new friends outside the truther scene.

As Christmas approached, I felt a bit guilty, and invited my father to my new house. I noticed that the only subject that interested him was Alles Schall und Rauch, which I found pretty repellent. I'd developed an aversion to conspiracy theories and preferred to form my own opinions. When I confronted him, he tried to pick an argument and convince me that I had been brainwashed by the mainstream media. I kept my mouth shut and waited for him to leave.

I don't want to blame everything on youthful impetuousness, but I always felt a moral obligation to my father.

My therapist recommended that I only meet my father on my terms. We began to meet in neutral places, ones where I could leave at any time. I also determined what we would talk about and how we would talk about it, and I alone decided the context of our next meeting. For a while, it worked. He probably realized he was gradually slipping out of his grasp and began really making an effort.

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But that was about four years ago, and now contact with my father is limited to the basics. Stressful incidents—like one anxiety-inducing Skype conversation where he ranted about refugees—prompted me to distance myself. He now resides in the contested Georgian republic of Abkhazia on the Black Sea, where he rages against the "devil-worshipping West." Now and then I visit Alles Schall und Rauch, mostly to read the comments. Readers talk about finding "intermarriage" abhorrent or how much they'd like to "put the low-life scum up against the wall." I sent my father a couple of his readers' quotes, and he promptly deleted them—then for some reason he called me an Islamophobe.

Today, I can say that I'm ashamed of my actions in that period of my life. I'm embarrassed that, just because I was confused, I let myself be waylaid by a bunch of paranoid weirdos. It's uncomfortable to think that I listened to rubbish like Die Bandbreite [a controversial German agitpop band] and tried to persuade my friends with my dumb theories. I don't want to blame everything on youthful impetuousness, but I always felt a moral obligation to my father, and it was practically impossible for me to escape his influence. Many of his readers can also probably vouch for this. Even if he finds their comments abusive, offensive, and aggressive, they still worship him as a prophet of truth.

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Because conspiracy theorists are immune to rational arguments from the "mainstream world," I consider the truth movement extremely dangerous. Like many subversive groups from the right, truthers mostly recruit people from difficult economic and social backgrounds—people who are happy to have scapegoats and seek leadership in the form of eloquent personalities. They vehemently deny belonging to the right, but my personal experiences speak for themselves: sexism, homophobia, and racism are as common in the scene as misguided ideas about culture and patriotism.

Despite this, I've taken one piece of my father's advice to heart. These days, I always try to use my brain.

* As the conspiracy scene is known for issuing death threats to ex-members and critics, this article has been published under "anonymous". The author's identity is known to the editorial team.