Jewish World Review Dec. 9, 2005 / 8 Kislev, 5766

False conspiracies poisonous

By Tucker Carlson

http://www.JewishWorldReview.com | A few days after Hurricane Katrina hit, a couple of my producers and I drove through the Ninth Ward, one of the poorest neighborhoods in New Orleans. While we watched, at least two warehouses burned unattended. There were no firemen in sight, not a single other car on the road. I remember thinking: If there's such a thing as government neglect, this is it. Nobody can stop a hurricane, but it's government's job to try to put out fires. If the firemen don't even bother to show up, what's the point of having a government?

It never occurred to me that the government was allowing the fires to burn on purpose. It had occurred to many of the people who live in the Ninth Ward. One of the first residents we ran into explained that white people had intentionally destroyed the poor parts of New Orleans, in an attempt to kill off or drive out the black population. He didn't explain which white people were doing this, or why they would want to. Apparently he assumed we already knew.

Even at the time, I was certain I'd hear about this conspiracy again. I was right. Days later, Louis Farrakhan publicly alleged that the federal government had blown up the city's levy system. He offered no proof, though he did supply a motive: The government was trying to kill black people. Amazingly, a number of well-known figures, including movie director Spike Lee, seemed to agree with Farrakhan, or at least give him the benefit of the doubt.

On Wednesday night, I interviewed a woman named Dyan French Cole. Cole is one of the New Orleans residents who testified on Capitol Hill Tuesday about the government response to Katrina. At the hearings, Cole repeated Farrakhan's claims that the levies were blown up by racist bureaucrats. Unlike, Farrakhan (who's smart enough to have ironic distance from his own demagoguery) Cole seemed to sincerely believe it.

The saddest part is, almost no one stood up to correct her. Instead, the usual collection of leftwing intellectuals made excuses for her conspiracy theories. As the august Harvard professor Alvin Pouissant explained to NBC, "If you're angry and you've been discriminated against, then your mind is open to many ideas about persecution, abandonment, feelings of rejection."

Strictly speaking, this is true. But it doesn't make the claim that white people blew up the levies any less crazy. Or for that matter, any less harmful. Theories like this stoke race hatred. They also make life more difficult for the people who believe them. It's one thing to believe in genocidal conspiracies if you're Louis Farrakhan or Spike Lee or a Harvard professor with tenure. Nobody's going to round you up and send you to a concentration camp. You know that for sure. But if you're living on $12,000 a year in the Ninth Ward of New Orleans, you may not be so certain.

False theories like this terrorize you, make you suspicious and angry. In the end they make your life less happy. Not that anyone at Harvard cares.