Here's an excerpt from the interview with Matt Taibbi, left gatekeeper, at the Onion AV Club:

AVC: In The Great Derangement, you document your infiltration into John Hagee's Cornerstone Church and your incognito participation in 9/11 Truth Movement meetings. Have you gotten a reaction from either camp since the book's publication?

MT: Oh yeah. Among the people that I was in church with, one of them actually saw me on television earlier this spring and called me up right afterward. So my cover was blown before the book even came out, which was kind of embarrassing. But I haven't heard too much from that whole crew. Weirdly enough, the letters I've been getting from a lot of Christians—not specifically from that church, but from other fundamentalist Christians—have been strangely positive in a way that I really didn't expect. A lot of people are very critical of Hagee's church, that it's deviating from the real message of Christ. I get a lot of letters of the "If only you'd experienced Christ through our church" variety. There's a lot of that, but relatively little abuse of the sort that you would've expected. The Truthers, on the other hand… [Laughs.] I think they're probably the most self-Googling sliver of humanity on the planet. The instant you write anything about them, your e-mail is flooded with letters. I haven't gotten a single positive reaction from anybody who's a self-described Truther.

AVC: You'd think a movement devoted to seeking truth would encourage debate as a way to arrive at the truth, rather than trying to suppress whatever doesn't already align with their own views.

MT: Absolutely. I make this point with Truthers all the time, that the whole direction of everything they do is the opposite of what finding out the truth is. They approach the subject matter in much the same way a defense attorney does. A defense attorney takes a case and he sees six pieces of evidence that are going to convict his client, and he sets out to destroy those six pieces of evidence, irrelevant to the actual truth of the situation. That's not to denigrate defense attorneys, but that's what they do. It's exactly the same thing that Truthers do. They just take the 9/11 Commission Report piece by piece, and they try to break down links in that evidentiary chain that compose the official story, but they never really try to find out what happened. They're just trying to convince you that the official story couldn't possibly be true. For instance, the stuff about Hani Hanjour—the hijacker who reportedly made that maneuver into the Pentagon. They're really hopped up about the fact that he was a bad pilot and couldn't have made that sophisticated maneuver. But they make absolutely no effort to tell you what actually did happen. They're like, "Oh, it could have been a remote-controlled plane." Offhandedly, they'll say that. [Laughs.] Like that's a very simple thing. It's really weird.

AVC: The whole "smoking gun" of the Truth Movement seems to revolve around the collapse of Building 7, near the Twin Towers. There's this matter-of-fact assertion that the government obviously blew it up.

MT: I love when you ask them, "Okay, so let's just say for instance that it wasn't collapsed by the fire. Why would you demolish Building 7? What would be the propaganda purpose of doing that?" They're like, "Oh, you know, they're hiding the evidence." I'm like, "They need to blow up a whole building to hide the evidence?" It's just crazy. But whatever. I mean, once you jump on board that train, you're on it for life. [Laughs.]

AVC: This "great derangement," as you've coined it, do you think it's unique to these times? Conspiracy theories and apocalyptic religious dogma have been around in various forms for a very long time. What's different about it now?

MT: America's always had a real passion for lunatic movements. That's one of the things we're probably known for around the world, I would imagine. I think what's different about it now is that we had a relatively cohesive national society for a while. For a giant industrial country, we had a situation where pretty much everybody agreed on the same sets of facts when they talked about the news, and they believed in the media. When somebody reported something, they generally accepted that it was true. For a long time, I think that was the case in this country. But recently, because of a bunch of things—there was a general collapse in faith of the mainstream news media, because of Jayson Blair. And the 2000 election was a situation where if you were on the Bush side, you believed X set of facts, and if you were on the Democratic side, you believed Y set of facts. The wound was never healed. You got a situation where people decided to reality-shop and search for their own sets of facts at their own news sources, and they just kind of stopped coming to this common meeting-place where we all had the same commonly accepted set of facts. And because of the Internet, which is a new phenomenon, people can do that more than ever before. You can have somebody living next door to you and you can live in a completely different world from that person, which is definitely something we've never experienced before. So I think just because of the media landscape and the way we get our information now, we're more atomized and isolated from each other than ever before.

AVC: The Internet has fed a lot of the suspicion people have for "mainstream media," but does the Internet suffer from its own distortions? Aren't there a lot of so-called "news" sites that manufacture their own version of events to play on fears and serve their own needs just as much as the established media?

MT: Yeah, sure. It's just for different reasons. Obviously the commercial news media tries to get you worked up and terrified so you'll buy products that they're advertising. I think the Internet is a completely different phenomenon. When you have movements like this that are preying on fears, or your misconceptions, they're doing it basically just to bolster their ranks and to self-aggrandize their movement objectives. It's not for commercial reasons, which is maybe a positive. It's a very similar phenomenon, it's just that it's for different reasons.