Like an Energizer Moonbat, she just keeps going … and going … Cynthia McKinney (D-Conspiracy).

A few links more, and you wind up at McKinney’s speech “Democracy Is Under Attack—Let’s take it Back.” The speech is a sort of lodestone for McKinniacs. It is a rambling series of remarks delivered at the Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem in July 2003. It is an angry speech. “I can’t be calm when I drive through sections of Atlanta that look more like Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo, than America,” McKinney explains. Yet the speech is notable mainly for the way in which it references McKinney’s conspiracy theorist guru, a man named Michael Ruppert.

Michael Ruppert is a former LAPD detective who is best known for his theories on CIA drug trafficking. Those theories—namely, that the CIA was behind the crack cocaine epidemic in America’s inner cities—briefly made headlines in mainstream newspapers in 1996, and Ruppert is hoping for a sequel. Since 9/11, he has toured the country discussing how the Bush administration, Enron, Israeli intelligence, the Pakistani ISI, the Saudis, and Osama bin Laden were behind the terrorist attacks. Ruppert’s theories are lucrative. Chip Berlet, who studies conspiracism as a senior analyst at Public Research Associates, a progressive group, told me that Ruppert speaks regularly to sold-out crowds.

“As you may know, I’m involved with Mike Ruppert of From the Wilderness,” McKinney says in her “Democracy Is Under Attack” speech. From the Wilderness is the title of Ruppert’s newsletter and website. McKinney probably got the idea that the USS Abraham Lincoln was “really in San Diego harbor” when Bush landed on it in May 2003 from Ruppert. So, too, her idea that Bush and his friends stood to profit from the 9/11 attacks, which she expands upon in another manifesto, the March 2002 “Thoughts on Our War Against Terrorism”:

Former President Bush sits on the board of the Carlyle Group. The Los Angeles Times reports that on a single day last month, Carlyle earned $237 million selling shares in United Defense Industries, the Army’s fifth-largest contractor. The stock offering was well timed: Carlyle officials say they decided to take the company public only after the Sept. 11 attacks.

Such ideas figure prominently in The Truth and Lies of 9/11, a videotaped lecture that Ruppert delivered at Portland State University on November 28, 2001. The lecture is 135 minutes long. It feels much longer. In it, Ruppert talks about the CIA, the Bush administration, the Carlyle Group, UNOCAL oil pipelines in Afghanistan, the Mossad, and—go figure—orange juice. The bottom line is that the Bush administration knew about the 9/11 attacks in advance and allowed them to happen for profit. Also, the “world financial system” is on the brink of “collapse.”

In its apocalyptic overtones, in its internationalist plot, in its view that apparent enemies are secretly collaborating, Ruppert’s The Truth and Lies of 9/11 is a textbook conspiracy theory. It is also a vehicle for Cynthia McKinney. She utters the penultimate line, and it’s a doozy. “The American people,” she says, “might have a criminal syndicate running their government.”