The Man Behind the Right Wing’s Favorite Conspiracy Theories (2024)

Meet David Booth, the fake news peddler who is helping Russia spread its lies.

No one is sure where President Trump got theidea that the Democratic National Committee’s hacked server was hidden inUkraine. As the impeachment saga unfolds, even the president’s most ardentdefenders, from Senator John Kennedy of Louisiana to Secretary of State MikePompeo, would rather talk about quid pro quos or revive the discredited claimthat Ukraine, not Russia, interfered in the 2016 United States presidential election—anythingto avoid discussing an evidence-free case that borders on lunacy. In herpowerful testimony before the House Intelligence Committee, Fiona Hill, aformer White House foreign policy adviser, characterized the story of the“missing” server as one of the fictions propagated by Russia’s securityservices, and Trump’s own staff had made a point of debunking it for thepresident. Nevertheless, in his fateful phone call of July 25, when the presidentasked Ukraine’s newly elected president to “do us a favor” and track down theDNC server, U.S. foreign policy was officially replaced by a conspiracy theory.

Astends generally to be the case with most of the overheated conspiracy theorieslighting up the internet and our political culture at large, the story of theUkraine-based server is something of an urban legend for the digitalage—caroming across our badly warped systems of news delivery from some greatOz-like font of right-wing misinformation, and just as abruptly alighting onour president’s diplomatic to-do list. Internet anonymity hides the identities ofthose behind the curtain who push this and scores of other coordinated assaultson consensual reality, from the insane anti-Semitic libels that inspire­ armedyoung men to march into synagogues and open fire, to the unhinged speculationsof the mysterious “Q” who posts cryptic messages revealing Trump’s secret waragainst a cabal of pedophiles in the American government and Hollywood.

A 64-year-old retired chemical plant control-room operator, Booth is one of the world’s foremost purveyors of conspiraciesand fake news. Writing under the nom de plume of Sorcha Faal on his websiteWhat Does It Mean, Booth and his wife have spent the past 15 years cooking upfabricated tales of impending war, government cover-ups, looming financialcollapse, alien arrivals, Satanic acts, earthquake weapons, man-madehurricanes, global apocalypse, and “deep state” machinations of all descriptions.On his website, Booth has falsely suggested that he is an officer in the Mossador the CIA. The truth about his life is equally fascinating—Booth happens tohave been the youngest person ever to attempt to hijack a plane in the U.S.—and an examination of his past, with its links to both Russia andRussian disinformation campaigns, opens a rare window into how and why someonecan be drawn into the world of conspiracies.

At first glance, it’s hard to imagine thatanyone takes What Does It Mean seriously. The site’s logo is stuffed with afifth grader’s idea of mysticism: the Virgin Mary, a dragon, a tarot card, awinged horse, and Noah’s ark. Pages are littered with multicolored links, andthe whole thing has an amateurish feel, harkening back to the days of DIY webconstruction in the mid-1990s. Yet What Does It Mean attracts visitors innumbers that would be a marked improvement over those pulled down by, say, a midsize newspaper’s website—roughly three-quarters of a million views in busy months,according to Alexa search rankings. Fans translate the site’s posts into Frenchand Spanish, read them aloud on YouTube, and discuss them online. One measureof the power of a conspiracy theory is how far and how deeply it spreads, andBooth’s reports travel the globe. Laundered through a constellation of morerespectable-looking, but no less empirically dodgy websites, they emerge inoverseas news outlets cited as fact. That’s how, to take just one example,Iran’s news agency, Fars, was duped into reporting in 2014 that top-secretdocuments leaked by Edward Snowden showed that U.S. policy has been guided byextraterrestrial intelligence.

The site’s slogan is “the news you need today… for the world you’ll live in tomorrow,” but in many ways Booth’s world isalready here. The election of a conspiracy theorist in chief has pushed conspiracies,lies, and half-truths onto the front pages and the evening news, while theadvent of the internet and social media give web-savvy conspiracy peddlersaccess to a much larger global market than they formerly dared to dream ofreaching. Conspiracy theories have become the political lingua franca of theTrump era—another sordid, sensationalist body of lies sold to people on thefringes of society who have been lied to so often they make sense out of nonsense.The stories are fake, told by a fictional person, but to many devotees, they feeltrue, and that keeps people coming back to Booth’s site for more.

“I’m getting tiredof everybody saying that Sorcha Faal is a fake,” complained Gary Larrabee, anelderly YouTuber with 35,000 followers who’s fond of reading Faal’s postsaloud. “I’ve been following her for 20 years. She’s not right on everything,but what other media service is more reliable?” Carol Elmer, a widow who posts stories from What Does ItMean on her Facebook page nearly every day, says she values the site for a“perspective” she can find nowhere else. She said she is aware of reports thatBooth is the sole author of the site’s content, as well as the claim pushed byBooth himself that he’s “an ex-CIA operative.” Most remarkably, she evendownplays the frequency with which her computer crashes when she visitsWhat Does It Mean—a common sign of multilayered hacking efforts. “I figure youonly catch flak when you are over the target,” she told me.

Booth, who wears a large, white Santa Clausbeard and lives with his wife in a modest home near the Smoky Mountains inTennessee, declined repeated requests to speak with me. He is, by bothprofession and temperament, a suspicious man—a Google search shows his driveway lined with “No Trespassing” signs—and his guarded posture toward the worldis inevitably reinforced by encounters with the kind of people his websiteattracts. In 2004, as What Does It Mean was finding its first significantonline following, a fan showed up in the backyard of his previous home in NewHampshire. “You and I both know that some of these people aren’t the kind ofpeople you want at your house,” Booth’s son, Justin, told me. And to judge by the people who share DavidBooth’s stories on Twitter, it’s wise to be wary. His work is popular withfollowers of QAnon, the pro-Trump conspiracy theory group that the FBI recentlylabeled as a domestic terrorism threat.The U.S. government, which has been tracking Booth’s site for years, usednearly a dozen links from What Does It Mean as background for a 2009 Departmentof Homeland Security report on the threat of right-wing extremism—before, thatis, an outcry from right-wing political leaders prompted the Obama White Houseto mothball the report and many of its recommendations.

A day after I contacted all the phone numbersand emails I had collected for Booth, I received a reply from one of his emailaccounts. “Hello Seth Hettena, We’ve been waiting for you, or at least someonelike you, for many years.” The email was signed by a “Nun Rahab,” who told methe email address (which I found on a family genealogy page) had been set upunder Booth’s name to “catch” reporters like me who were fascinated by “one ofthe most mysterious persons I’ve ever comeacross in my entire life.” Nun Rahab’s email about Booth was a mix of fact andfantasy that tried to suggest Booth was a CIA psychic, but the writer did showa familiarity with intimate details of Booth’s life that turned out to be true,such as his recent medical problems, as well as previously unreported incidentsfrom 27 years ago.

Although Nun Rahab claimedto be writing me from outside the U.S. (somewhere in the time zonethat includes Amsterdam and Vienna), the emails I received showed they werecoming from a data center near Knoxville, Tennessee, not far from Booth’s home.When I pointed this out, I received a call in no short order from Booth’s son, Justin,who told me his father had dictated him a note that appeared to be an attemptto make me believe that David Booth had nothing to do with the site he founded.This turned out to be a mistake. First, Justin Booth and I started talkingabout his father and his website, and second, it resolved any nagging doubts Ihad about who was really behind the site. Nun Rahab was David Booth.

I tried to ask “Nun Rahab” about thewebsite’s fascination with Russia and whether someone from abroad was feedingWhat Does It Mean its information, or, more precisely, its disinformation. The site’scontent has followed the same basic pattern for most of the past 15 years: A“chilling,” “astounding and frankly terrifying,” or “heart-stopping” new reportout of a Kremlin ministry or a Russian intelligence agency has revealed somefrightening bombshell or some new orders issued by Russian President VladimirPutin. Booth’s obsession with Russia has perplexedmembers of his family. When Justin asked him once what it was allabout, his father told him, “I can’t talk about it.”

Until the 2016 election, thelurid fare featured on What Does It Mean could easily be dismissed as overheated,but ultimately harmless, nuttery. Here,too, we can fix a fairly precise point of origin for the site’s ascension inthe Trump era: On May 6,2016, What Does It Mean revealed that a “war of words” had broken out insidethe Kremlin about whether to release tens of thousands of emails that Russianspies had obtained from Hillary Clinton’s private email server. The dispute,What Does It Mean reported, was between Alexander Bortnikov, the head of theRussian FSB, the successor agency to the KGB, and Valentina Matviyenko, thespeaker of Russia’s upper house of Parliament. In fact, although it was not yetpublic knowledge, Russia did have thousands of emails Russian spies hadobtained from the DNC servers and the Clinton campaign that would shortly bereleased by WikiLeaks. What Does It Mean’s story was quickly picked up by thefervently pro-Trump website The Gateway Pundit. Fox News contributor AndrewNapolitano (a onetime Trump ally who’s since fallen out with the president) discussedit on Megyn Kelly’s show and later in a column in The Washington Times. At the summit of the innuendo-ladenright-wing news cycle,Sean Hannity repeated the substance of theWhat Does It Mean report on his radio show. Neither Napolitano nor Hannity credited the originalsource.

On July 13, 2016, three days after Seth Richwas gunned down in the streets of Washington, D.C., in what investigators suspect wasa botched robbery, Sorcha Faal quoted a “somber” account from the SVR, Russia’sforeign intelligence agency, claiming that Rich was preparing to testifyagainst Hillary Clinton. Instead, he was assassinated by a “hit team” during asecret meeting he believed he was having with the FBI. The “hit team,” thereport continued, was captured after a prolonged gun battle near the WhiteHouse. It was all a lie, except for one critical part: The What Does It Meanreport matched details in an actual SVR disinformation “bulletin.”

In a story first reported by Yahoo News’ Michael Isikoff, Deborah Sines, the U.S. attorney inWashington overseeing the Rich murder case, learned of the SVR bulletin fromU.S. intelligence as she grappled with the many conspiracy theories swirlingaround the case. (Sines declined to speak with me.) The details of the WhatDoes It Mean story matched those in the SVR bulletin—Rich’s purported meetingwith the FBI, a Hillary Clinton “hit team,” and the gun battle near the WhiteHouse. The SVR bulletin had been written—in Russian, Isikoff told me—on July13, the same day that What Does It Mean published its report, which contained ahelpful note: “Some words and/or phrases appearing in quotes are Englishlanguage approximations of Russian words/phrases having no exact counterpart.”

The “hit team” story was knocked down thefollowing day by the fact-checking site Snopes—a fate shared by many of thesite’s dispatches that go viral. But as in most of these cases, the damage had alreadybeen done: The story was blood in the water for a large audience long predisposedto believe that the Clintons murder people. The ranks of these believersincluded Roger Stone, Newt Gingrich, and DonaldTrump, who resurrected a common hard-right conspiracy theory from the long-agotime before internet virality, dubbing the circ*mstances of Clinton White Houseattorney Vince Foster’s 1993 death “very fishy.”

For his part, “Nun Rahab” toldme it was “preposterous” to suggest that What Does It Mean used secret Russiangovernment information. Someone in the U.S. intelligence community was obviouslytrying to make me think that, Nun Rahab suggested, adding “maybe yourmind should turn around and consider the possibility that it’s us who aretalking to them.” When I asked Nun Rahab about the source of the “hit team”story, he pointed out that What Does It Mean wasn’t the only high-profile the-truth-is-out-theresite raising suspicions about Rich’s murder. None of the examples he cited wentbeyond speculation, and more significantly, this was an answer to a question Iwasn’t asking. When I pressed the question, I received disquisitions about international finance andthe price of gold. I had my own Twitter posts quoted back at me and was toldto stick to facts instead of unsupported short-term political agendas. Later, Iheard from “Brian,” the webmaster at What Does It Mean, who wrote letters tothe Justice Department accusing me of using my FBI contacts to “access restricted U.S. government database informationon a private American citizen named David Booth.”

Without a full-fledged governmentinvestigation, it’s nearly impossible to figure out how an SVR bulletin woundup on What Does It Mean, said Clint Watts, a senior fellow at the ForeignPolicy Research Institute and (yes) a former FBI agent. Although he didn’t knowany specific background information about Booth or his site, Watts said theKremlin does identify outlets willing to publish virtually anything andsupplies them with material when they need to push a particular message. Thisbattery of online “useful idiots,” as Watts called them, may have one-on-onecontact with Russian operatives or receive (dis)information passed throughthird parties. “The closer you get to Moscow, themore they are in coordination with the Kremlin,” he said. “The further away youget the less so,unless they happen to have traveled back and forth toRussia and developed connections—or [if] they’re really into Russia or VladimirPutin.”

Booth is really intoRussia. In the early 1990s, while Booth was living in Nashua, New Hampshire, heand his then wife launched a charity drive called “To Russia, With Love” thatcollected 4,500 pounds of donated food, clothing, and medicine to help formerSoviet citizens get through the winter. When that marriage fell apart, Booth enteredinto a series of relationships with Russian women, one of whom he sued forlibel and accused of stealing nearly $30,000 worth of his household goods duringa contentious divorce, according to court documents. He has visited Russia atleast once. In 1995, a curious item appeared in The New York Times Magazinethat identified David Booth as president of a Nashua-based company called “WarTours Ltd.” that offered clients visits to war zones in places like the former SovietUnion. There was no record of War Tours Ltd. at the New Hampshire secretary of state’soffice, and I heard later that Booth told his son that the whole thing was ahoax to prove that the media would publish anything.

Booth’s Russian infatuation is reciprocated on the far side of the former Iron Curtain. Booth and hisalter ego Sorcha Faal have become a reliable source of fascination in Russia’smediasphere, where news outlets have fallen for several of his viral hoaxes, such as the 2014What Does It Mean report claiming that 13 CIA military operatives had beenkilled in Ukraine on a mission to help battle Russian forces invading thecountry. In recent years, the Russian press has published numerous “Who is Sorcha Faal?” stories. Among them is a 2009 story in the Russian newspaper Izvestia that quoted two leading Russian experts oninformation warfare. Alexander Dugin, an ultranationalist Russian politicalscientist who is considered close to Putin, maintained that What Does It Meanwas an example of what he called “network wars”: “Organizations that areneither special forces nor secret societies arrange for the information to be thrownaround. For example, ideological divisions waging geopolitical war.” IgorPanarin, a Russian political scientist and former KGB officer, told Izvestiathat “of course” Western and Western-aligned intelligence services were behindthe website, but it wasn’t clear whether it was theBritish MI6, Israel’s Mossad, the CIA, or the U.S. National Security Agency. TheRussian experts saw the site as a way of increasing geopolitical tensionsbetween, say, Russia and Iran in an untraceable way.

Over the same generaltimeline, a robust network of global conspiracy-mongering sites has sprung upto help Booth spread lies. Sorcha Faal’s stories were occasionallypromoted by Russian internet trolls connected to the Internet Research Agency,a St. Petersburg troll farm that amplified divisive content during the 2016election, according to millions of online postings released by Twitter from thousandsof IRA accounts. Kremlin-aligned Twitter trolls tracked by the Alliance forSecuring Democracy, an initiative of the German Marshall Fund, haveoccasionally done the same thing over the past few years, according to EricEllason, a security researcher at Slickrockweb, a small data analytics andinformation technology firm. One of the frequent reposters of Sorcha Faalstories is The European Union Times, a site the Southern Poverty Law Centerfound was registered to Jessica Nachtman, whose husband, Christopher, was identifiedas a racist skinhead gang member. (JessicaNachtman told the SPLC she provides web hosting for a “European” she declinedto identify.) Overseas, Sorcha Faal stories often land on the Bulgarian site Strogo Sekretno (Top Secret),published by Krassimir Ivandjiiski, whose son, Daniel, founded Zero Hedge, awebsite owned by a Bulgarian company that pushes right-wing conspiracy theoriesand publishes pro-Russia commentary originating in the West. This network ofconspiracy sites repeats the same information so often that impressionable readerswho stumble into it can leave thinking they’vedone their homework, said Emerson Brooking, a resident fellow at the DigitalForensic Research Lab of the Atlantic Council, a think tank. “The effect onthese people is they get enmeshed in these worlds of conspiracy theories, and itbecomes harder and harder to make their way back out,” he said.

As the 2020 election approaches, What Does It Mean’s far-flung conspiracynetwork has Russian disinformation experts like Watts worried. “Russia doesn’thave a Wikileaks or DC Leaks this time,” he said. “The only option if theywanted to mess around is to go to conspiracy websites, go to friendly outletsthatwe call ‘fellow traveler’ outlets, content providers that shareRussia’s worldview,and deliver them information one-to-one, and let thembe the messenger into the target audience space.”

There’s no surefire way to pinpoint the birthof a full-fledged conspiracy-monger, but, if one were to take a stab at such athing in Booth’s case, the night of May 16, 1979, would be a strong contender.At the time, Booth, then 23, was managing a rental-car office and getting overa troubled childhood that had exploded a decade earlier onto the evening news.A self-described “confused, messed-up kid,” Booth had cut school one day in thefall of 1969 and gone to the airport in his native Cincinnati. There, he took ateenage girl hostage with a butcher knife, boarded a plane, and demanded to beflown to Sweden. Airport police were able to quickly talk him down, and the14-year-old surrendered without incident when authorities promised not toarrest him.

If ever there was a cry for help, this wasclearly one, but Booth’s family washed its hands of him. Newspaperreports quoted an attorney for the parents calling Booth “mentally ill,” and hisfamily declared him incorrigible, which made the boy a ward of the state. Thesystem, however, showed Booth the mercy that his parents couldn’t or wouldn’t.Instead of locking him up in juvenile detention, a judge sentenced him to ahome for vulnerable children, which helped him get his life back together. Thejudge “was the one person who had enough faith in kids that they could berehabilitated,” Booth told The Cincinnati Enquirer nearly three decadeslater. “I haven’t been in trouble with the law since.”

Ten years after the hijacking, on that night in 1979, Boothwas living in Cincinnati with a wife and a newborn baby, when he had the firstin a series of disturbing, recurring dreams involving an American Airlinesairliner that crashed upside-down. After experiencing the same dream for severalnights running, Booth called the Federal Aviation Administration and told theagency about it. Three days later, American Airlines Flight 191 rolled over andcrashed after takeoff from Chicago, killing 273 people in what remains thedeadliest passenger airline accident on U.S. soil. In a story that appearedin The Chicago Tribune, the FAA conceded that there were remarkablesimilarities between the dream and the crash, but Booth himself wasskeptical. “I don’t believe in any ofthat spooky stuff, you know?” he said.

Over time, though, Booth became a believer.His dreams of Flight 191 led to a string of appearances on TV shows exploringthe paranormal, such asIn Search Of… and Arthur C. Clarke’s World ofStrange Powers. When A&E Television Networks aired a show thatfeatured Booth’s dream with an actor playing him and got key details wrong, thefuture founder of one of the world’s foremost sources of fake news sued thenetwork for, among other things, defamation and deceiving the public. In hislawsuit, filed in 1997, Booth said he had never experienced any subsequentpremonitions of any kind, but “he carefully guards the story of his 1979experience because he feels that if it were to occur again in the future, hiscontinued credibility will be extremely important.” (The case was later settled out of court, andrepresentatives of A&E did not return messages seeking comment.)

“I love my dad. He’s been a great dad, but when you are the son of, arguably, the only documentedpsychic in the history of the country, it can be taxing,” Booth’s son, Justin,told me.

Sure enough, six years afterthe A&E lawsuit, the premonitions came again, and this time they foretolda much larger disaster. In March 2003, Boothhad a series of dreams about a “large, darkplanetary object” hurtling toward the Earth followed by a huge explosion. Identifyinghimself as an “internationally-known psychic,” Booth registered What Does ItMean later that year as a collaboration with his friend, the late Wayne Green,an early computer pioneer. With Green’shelp, and his past dreams of Flight 191 serving as his calling card,Booth appeared on Coast-to-Coast, ahugely popular, overnight AM radio show on the paranormal. The man whodidn’t believe in spooky stuff was, in the promotional language of the show,now “the only person in the world to have had a pre-cognitive experience fullydocumented prior to the event by a government agency.”

Booth moved quickly tocapitalize on his Coast-to-Coast appearance with a 2004 book, CodeRed: The Coming Destruction of the United States, which his son, Justin, hastilyassembled by hand. The dream and bookcame at an opportune time for Booth, who had endured three personalbankruptcies, three broken marriages, and the dissolution of his latestventure, a computer business. But Booth’s burgeoning career as a twenty-first-centurypsychic came to an end almost as quickly as it had begun. He traveled to Europeand returned claiming he had met with Sister Lucia of Fatima, a Carmelite nuncelebrated for her visions of the Virgin Mary. Coast-to-Coast invitedBooth back again in 2004 to discuss his meeting with Sister Fatima, but herefused to talk about it and was kicked off the air and banned from the show.The show’s host, George Noory, said he had been duped. A barrister in Australiaclaimed that Code Red plagiarized his wife’s 2002 article word for word,down to the typographical errors. The credibility that Booth had carefullynurtured for years was destroyed.

It was around this time that Sorcha Faal appeared.Displaying a knack for reinvention, Booth took his name off his website to bereplaced by the mysterious Ms. Faal’s. She was initially described as a Russianresearcher from St. Petersburg with an engineering background and, later, as anun from a made-up Irish order said to predate Jesus. Faal’s picture on WhatDoes It Mean is that of Booth’s current wife, Kathy.

What motivates a man to wake up every morningand write lies? I had started this story thinking it would yield some insightabout Russia’s hidden hand in U.S. affairs, but another story was staring me rightin the face. “The only reason to run and start a website like that is to do itas a business,” Justin Booth says.

Booth’s lies have managed to attract a largeaudience, which he regularly importunes for donations. A September post aboutthe “forces of Lucifer” trying to destroy President Trump concludes with a pleathat would sound familiar to every public radio listener: “Our needs today aredire indeed, but, if every one of you reading this gave just $20.00 today, ourbudget for the entire year would be met!” David Booth told Justin that WhatDoes It Mean takes in between $5,000 and $7,000 a month in donations, which is morethan the average salary in Tennessee. Despite a total of five bankruptciesbetween them, Booth and his wife now hold title to more than 100 acres of landin Kentucky.

I made a $1 contribution to What Does It Meanvia PayPal. The contribution was refunded, but PayPal provided me with contactinformation that connects the money to Booth via his Nevada company Long TrailAcres Publishing LLC, previously identified as the registrant of What Does ItMean. (In papers filed in 2012 in connection with his fourth bankruptcy, Boothstated that he last worked for Long Trail Acres four years earlier.) There’s also an LLC called Sisters of Sorcha Faal in Nevadaregistered to Booth’s wife, Kathy, presumably for some business ventureconnected to the phony religious order.

What Does It Mean also tries to profit from the fears of its audience in other ways. In 2010, the site offered readers thelimited opportunity for $24.99 to buy a “Cloak of Athena” that was said toprotect them from government eavesdroppers and credit-card thieves.“Dangerisupon you now,” the site warned, “it lies in yourcell phone listening in on every conversation you have and tracking every placeyou go and in every ID and credit card you leave unprotected.Makeyour decision about this incredible offer before it’s too late!”

Of course, the conspiracybusiness can lead to even bigger things. There is no better example of this right nowthan Donald Trump, whose meteoric rise to power came on the back of the racist“birther” conspiracy theory he pushed for years—a completely bogus claim thatPresident Barack Obama was not born in the United States. Trump’s shamelessconspiracy peddling gave him a platform to launch a presidential campaignthat would be “the greatest infomercial in political history,” according to hisformer attorney, Michael Cohen. “Mr. Trump ran for office to make his brandgreat,” Cohen told Congress under oath, “not to make our country great.”

Conspiracy is also a business that has madepeople like Alex Jones, the founder of Infowars,very rich. Jones’s angry, nativist rants and conspiracy theories, abouteverything from the sinister origins of “chemtrails” to the horrifically baselessassertion that the Sandy Hook school massacre was a “false flag” actionorchestrated by the federal government, have propelled the Trump-allied radiotalker into lucrative national renown—even as his Sandy Hook lies have led todefamation lawsuits from parents of murdered children. By 2014, Jones’sInfowarsempire was generating $20 million a year in revenue and $5 million inprofits, according to an investigation by The New York Times.Most of that money came from the sale of supplements like “Super Male Vitality”and “Brain Force Plus.” (Not coincidentally, What Does It Mean runs advertisingfor Phi Sciences, an Arizona company that sells supplements like “Mega Hydrate”and “Crystal Energy.”) Likewise, the legions of QAnon followers have inspired abazaar of online merchants hawking Q-branded T-shirts, ball caps, iPhone cases,coffee mugs, and books.

Like the mysterious “Q,” Sorcha Faal is amask—one that David Booth dons in order to spin out his fantasies from animaginary arm’s-length source. The Faal persona also allows him to keep his twoidentities separate: David Booth ran a local union representing workers at aNew Hampshire chemical plant; Sorcha Faal writes about the “leftist-socialistunion bosses trying to destroy President Trump.” David Booth told his son he wasexcited about the historic election of Barack Obama as the firstAfrican-American president of the United States; less than a month later,Sorcha Faal wrote that “Obama from Kenya” presaged the age of the “Mark of theBeast” and noted the “stunning parallels” between Hitler’s and Obama’s rise topower. David Booth sues for libel and defamation when people get facts wrong;Sorcha Faal produces mountains of fake news and defamatory content.

Russia may be the flavor of the month, but the sad, shabby truth about Booth and his worldof conspiracies is that it’s just another cruelly exploitative business, onethat offers a fleeting, intoxicating glimpse of a hiddenworld for readers and listeners who feel ever more lost and overlooked in thereal one. What drives a man to wake upevery morning and write lies and fables is, in other words, the same thing thatdrove the old snake-oil salesman to travel from town to town peddling tincturesand other bogus home medical remedies. Like his fellow conspiracy peddlersDonald Trump, Sean Hannity, and Alex Jones, David Booth is a true believer, untilbelieving is bad for business.