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



As tends generally to be the case with most of the overheated conspiracy theories lighting up the internet and our political culture at large, the story of the Ukraine-based server is something of an urban legend for the digital age—caroming across our badly warped systems of news delivery from some great Oz-like font of right-wing misinformation, and just as abruptly alighting on our president’s diplomatic to-do list. Internet anonymity hides the identities of those behind the curtain who push this and scores of other coordinated assaults on consensual reality, from the insane anti-Semitic libels that inspire­ armed young men to march into synagogues and open fire, to the unhinged speculations of the mysterious “Q” who posts cryptic messages revealing Trump’s secret war against a cabal of pedophiles in the American government and Hollywood.

There are exceptions, however. In a handful of cases, it’s possible to trace some of the most destructive theories back to their source. Take, for example, the conspiracy theory that DNC staffer Seth Rich was killed in 2016 by a “hit team”; or the campaign seeking to tar Christine Blasey Ford, the woman who accused Justice Kavanaugh of sexually assaulting her in high school, as deeply tied to the CIA; or the report that the bones of children were found on Jeffrey Epstein’s island—all these myths lead back to one person. In each of these cases, we can confidently trace the confabulation in question to a man named David Lawrence Booth.

A 64-year-old retired chemical plant control-room operator, Booth is one of the world’s foremost purveyors of conspiracies and fake news. Writing under the nom de plume of Sorcha Faal on his website What Does It Mean, Booth and his wife have spent the past 15 years cooking up fabricated tales of impending war, government cover-ups, looming financial collapse, alien arrivals, Satanic acts, earthquake weapons, man-made hurricanes, global apocalypse, and “deep state” machinations of all descriptions. On his website, Booth has falsely suggested that he is an officer in the Mossad or the CIA. The truth about his life is equally fascinating—Booth happens to have 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 and Russian disinformation campaigns, opens a rare window into how and why someone can be drawn into the world of conspiracies.

At first glance, it’s hard to imagine that anyone takes What Does It Mean seriously. The site’s logo is stuffed with a fifth grader’s idea of mysticism: the Virgin Mary, a dragon, a tarot card, a winged horse, and Noah’s ark. Pages are littered with multicolored links, and the whole thing has an amateurish feel, harkening back to the days of DIY web construction in the mid-1990s. Yet What Does It Mean attracts visitors in numbers 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 French and Spanish, read them aloud on YouTube, and discuss them online. One measure of the power of a conspiracy theory is how far and how deeply it spreads, and Booth’s reports travel the globe. Laundered through a constellation of more respectable-looking, but no less empirically dodgy websites, they emerge in overseas 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-secret documents leaked by Edward Snowden showed that U.S. policy has been guided by extraterrestrial intelligence.