It’s a bit shocking to me when I see people online putting 9/11 conspiracies in the same box as “MAGA” conspiracies (for lack of a better term, sorry).
For reference, I was 24 in 2001 living in central NJ. Even without social media or fake news websites or what cable news has become today, I have vivid memories of people having the firm belief that there was something up with the attack on 9/11. Was this just my social circle?
Jet fuel melting steel beams was one of the more fringe and unfounded (and quickly debunked) ideas but the rest of everything on that day was questionable. Tower seven falling, the missing plane debris at the pentagon and central PA, the military / president not responding to known threats, if a person with limited flight time could hit a tower, the fact that Bush attacked a country that had nothing to do with the event, and so much more are still, I thought, reasonable questions - especially when looked at together.
This is not about rehashing each theory. Or maybe it is? Have I missed that everything has been debunked?
I mean, I still believe 9/11 was an inside job or at least high level officials, including Bush, were aware it was going to happen and did nothing to stop it. I thought this was still a common opinion of most or many Americans over the age of forty.
I certainly heard a lot of conspiracy theories at the time, but I didn’t know anyone who believed them. But I don’t and didn’t really hang out with the type of people that believe stuff like that in general. My friends and family are generally empirical evidence people, logical thinkers rather than emotional.
I’d be curious to know how some of your friends and family responded to the shot taken at Trump’s ear.
I would assume reasonably and reservedly, rather than jumping the gun. It’s certainly how I responded. Not sure what you really mean to ask though.
If you mean about conspiracy theories, I can pretty much assure they waited to see what was actually the case rather than believe the first thing they heard.
No, this was just your social circle. I know literally zero people who ever bought into any of that crap
Well, this one is real
Bush attacked a country that had nothing to do with the event
Well, yeah. That’s not really in the same category or ever really disputed
I knew a dude who swore up and down the jets had missile launchers on the front they fired just before impact.
So your evidence that it was only spoken about in my social circle is that your social circle didn’t talk about it?
No, that’s my evidence that it wasn’t ubiquitous and typical.
Maybe not just your social circle, but social-circle-specific.
Im so glad archive.org exists. People keep trying to change history when you can just go to archive.org and see all the real actions people took those days.
Seriously, it was pretty fringe to be openly truther back then.
It wasn’t till Obama that we started getting all these batshit insane morons on parade.
Birtherism really pushed it, but basically losing 2008 made the right desperate, they were willing to recruit from anybody, anywhere, right when social media started its upswing.
I think we can say most of our modern conspiracitardacy was fairly quiet till the social media wave.
That is not what I recall. What I do recall was both republicans and democrats having serious concerns that the government knew something we didn’t and that we were attacking a country for the president’s personal vendetta. This is based on my personal interactions with friends, family, and coworkers, as well as national and local news and newspapers. Granted, I’m from central NJ so perhaps we on higher alert and more “purple” than the rest of the country.
batshit insane morons
Was it birtherism or just Sarah Palin?
I think we can say most of our modern conspiracitardacy was fairly quiet till the social media wave.
I fully agree that social media has made things worse in this, and almost every, regard. Though, I’m trying to understand the mindset of Americans in 2001, not today, not post 2008.
The conspiracy around 9/11 was that the government knew more than they were telling us. That perhaps they were well aware of the event, possibly took part in it, and/or used it to manipulate public sentiment for invading Iraq for no other good reason or perhaps (ok, this I admit is crazy) setting up a new world order where we give up our rights for the sake of “national defense”. There would be no Wikileaks if there was no 9/11.
I admit this are a bit fringe-sounding but we were all aware of this back then. Didn’t most people believe there was some plausibility in these theories?
Don’t most people today believe the government knows more about 9/11 than they’ve told us?
The only thing I remember people being remotely close to believing was that Bush was so incompetent that he allowed a terrorist attack to happen.
It’s not really a theory that Bush was an incompetent fuckwit, but it’s highly debatable if they knew enough to stop it.
highly debatable if they knew enough to stop it.
Well, the theory that was floated at the time was that they didn’t want to stop it. The very fringe suggested it was entirely planned by the US. They (Bush et al) knew this would provoke our military and provide an excuse to attack the Middle East. To finish was Bush senior didn’t.
Again, I don’t really want to get down a rabbit hole of validating theories. I want to know if others recall this being a national conversation or if it was just the hundreds of people I knew and news outlets I was watching.
In my mind, it’s not that the intelligence community had indisputable evidence that said “these people are going to hijack these plans at this time and simultaneously crash them into these buildings”…but moreso “there is chatter about an upcoming attack involving hijacked planes” but they didn’t have enough to act on it.
Now…with that part said, I 100% fully agree that this attack was used as a blank-check excuse to invade the Middle East carte clanche.
I definitely remember some people screeing about Bush and Cheney wanting it, but IIRC, everyone was treating it like suspicion at most.
The Epstein conspiracy theory was accepted FAR more readily, but then that’s basically guaranteed to be true to some degree, even if it was truly just the jailors being incompetent fuckwits that wanted to take justice in to their own hands.
not at all your imagination, most of the stuff you listed is established fact.
A lot of people don’t believe in “conspiracies” unless they already “know” that the conspiracy is true, in which case they believe it was never a “conspiracy”, even though something like 9/11 was obviously a secret plan that a small group plotted to cause harm.
I was 31 when the attacks happened.
While I do think that there was an awareness that an attack was possible, or even in the works. I sincerely doubt that anyone truly thought that 3 airplanes were going to be flown into buildings on that day and one crash in a PA field. The US had the attitude that we were isolated and well defended enough that such attacks were unthinkable. The complete one sidedness of Gulf War 1 really gave the US an out of proportion notion of being invulnerable. Even though the WTC was bombed 9 years prior, two years after the end of GW1.
Conspiracy denotes malicious intelligent intent. The reality is closer to stupidly complacent. Sometimes the two are hardly indistinguishable.
“It’s in the Bible”, is what my boss at one time believed.
I started there a few years after the events and wondered why this guy kept a 9/12 newspaper front page on display. I thought it was in poor taste but so be it. Eventually the topic came up and he started spitting out bible quotes to explain it all clear as day. He also laughed at dinosaurs!
Sadly, enough of the others there were bible toters too and did not disagree. I moved on before the Trump and covid fun began but I’m sure it was nuts.
That office changed me to my core. Seeing people living so deep in their own fantasy world that they would apply those fantasies to real world events was truly depressing.
These were professional engineers. Not kooks. My time there made me lose any respect for religion. Fanatics and conspiracy theorists are all attention seeking story tellers in need of gullible listeners.
From my understanding it’s pretty widely known that most intelligence agencies though something could happen but not the specifics, and chose not to act on that information or communicate with one another.
The exact reasons aren’t known obviously. My gut tells me incompetence/apathy from government agencies. That’s not a very cinematic or compelling answer, though, and I think a lot of people look for more interesting narratives.
Whenever a big tragedy like 9/11 happens, people tend to try and look for the Chekhov’s gun that shows a deeper meaning or dramatic orchestration. That’s just not real life though.
I still do, at least when it comes to the pentagon. There was also evidence of high frequency trading that occurred right before the attack.
There are a few conspiracy theories remember hearing a lot about (aside from steel fuel melting jet beams and tower 7) that I never quite followed up on. If know of evidence debunking these please share…
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CIA confiscating Security cam footage from a gas state across the street from the Pentagon which shows an American cruise missile hitting it instead of an airplane.
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No plane debris found at the Pentagon
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That entire wing of the Pentagon which was hit was “conveniently” closed for renovations
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No plane debris at the crash site in PA, which is said to have went down because the pilots bravely crashed on purpose to thwart the terrorist plans
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The owners of the twin towers updated huge insurance policies the day(s) leading up to 9/11.
The jet fuel burning steal beams is an interesting one. I remember, perhaps weeks after the event, if not days, scientists being interviewed on national news explaining the science about this and being very clear that this was certainly plausible - it wasn’t just the jet fuel but the surrounding materials and chimney like effect of the building which increased the fire’s temperature (don’t quote me on these details).
How it became the most prominent conspiracy theory is wild to me. Not dissimilar from a random xenophobic Facebook post about illegal immigrants eat pets becoming a major talking point during a presidential debate. Or how it was verified that the 2020 election was the most secure in our nation’s history yet more than half of Americans believe voter fraud is a serious threat.
As you’ve pointed out, that’s just a fraction of the “coincidences” surrounding this event. Individually, I could understand they’d be forgotten or swept under the rug but as a whole, it’s just a lot of stuff to swallow if you want to believe the “official” report. At the same time, I acknowledge that for this many “coincidences” to be planned out would probably be impossible to cover up.
In comparison, consider what’s know and still covered up about the JFK assassination. This is relatively small potatoes in scale compared to 9/11.
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I still believe 9/11 was an inside job or at least high level officials, including Bush, were aware it was going to happen
Crazy talk. This was absolutely not a widely held opinion.
It’s not accurate to say Afghanistan had nothing to do with it. The Taliban government were directly helping to hide Bin Laden after the fact, and obviously it was not going to do anything to stop violent extremism, rather it was going to reward and encourage it.
I didn’t support it when it started, and I certainly didn’t support the all twenty of the years we spent there, but I believe now that the decision to overthrow the Taliban at least initially was the right one. Maybe some people in Washington pushed went along with it as a handout to the oil and defense industries, but I think most of the legislators went with it because they truly believed, as I do, that overthrowing the Taliban and helping the people build a new state, with real institutions, was a path towards securing lasting human rights to millions of people. No religious dictatorship can grant human rights, it’s not theirs to give.
9/11 in itself would not be as sketchy if they did not use it as pretext to force through a ton of privacy violation laws which just so happened to be ready and only needed an excuse. And invade the middle east with a convenient pretext. And the FBI having advance warnings about 9/11 which were ignored.
I don’t care about whether it was jet fuel or pre planted explosives. 9/11 was used as an excuse to invade countries which we now know had nothing to do with it. And at the time the government knew they were lying about those countries complicity. So I still believe there is more to the story than what is made public.
The only conspiracy that I or people I know may have given credence to is the idea that people high up in the House of Saud knew about, condoned and/or funded the attacks.
And there’s actual evidence that it’s not just a theory.
A lot of people made fun of those theories and sarcastically pretended to believe in them. Maybe that’s what you remember. Our human memories are not very reliable.
For the first few weeks, everybody wanted answers, and when people don’t get answers, we make them up.
I remember hearing and seriously considering nearly all of the theories you mentioned, but as we started to get more answers, most people just forgot about, or stopped listening to the conspiracies.
Unless, of course, you were DEDICATED to one of the conspiracies, and surrounded yourself with like minded people who dismissed any evidence that went against their beliefs. Much like MAGA when you mention all the evidence that Trump lost the last election, or committed over 34 felonies.
most people just forgot about, or stopped listening to the conspiracies.
This is what I think happened. People just stopped caring and defaulted back to “trusting the government” or were distracted by other things like the war in Afghanistan and the 2008 financial crisis.
In my mind, these theories were still prevalent for at least a few years after the attacks. And now, 20 years later, people forgot so much that they’ve accepted that only weirdo internet trolls believe in these fringe theories.
