Showing posts with label 9/11 Truth. Show all posts
Showing posts with label 9/11 Truth. Show all posts

Thursday, September 2, 2021

The Spike Lee controversy and the end of the conspiracy theorist hero



I was recently interviewed for this article for the French film-magazine, Telerama, about Spike Lee’s new documentary miniseries about New York and the strange, needless controversy surrounding it. As the article details, Lee appears to be a conspiracist who inserted a 30-minute-long segment about the claims of the so-called 9/11 “truth movement” into the final episode of his upcoming HBO documentary, “NYC Epicenters 9/11-2021 ½.” 

Lee’s film focuses on New York City and how it has fared over the last two decades, from the 9/11 attacks until the impact of the current COVID-19 pandemic. Therefore, since the miniseries foregrounds New York culture over that twenty-year period rather than dealing specifically with 9/11, the insertion of what critics have called a virtual endorsement of one of the most repellent 9/11 conspiracy theorists seems peculiar.

 

The segment which Lee has since removed, reportedly leaving the final installment of the documentary series only 90-minutes-long whereas the other episodes each clock in at two hours, essentially gives the microphone to Richard Gage, the founder of “Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth.” Among 9/11 conspiracy theorists, Gage’s claims about the attack are particularly offensive and deranged. Aside from the standard, debunked canards of the 9/11 conspiracy mythology – that jet fuel couldn’t have melted steel, that the collapse of the towers was a controlled demolition, and that the collapse of Tower 7 is some kind of a “smoking gun” proving a conspiracy – Gage has argued that the towers were actually hit by drones camouflaged by holograms. He has repeatedly endorsed the claims that the Israeli government was behind the attacks, appearing on numerous podcasts and conspiracy-friendly outlets that also believe the Holocaust was a hoax and that all the world’s miseries are caused by all-powerful, all-controlling Jewish cabals. Recently Gage has also jumped on the COVID-conspiracy bandwagon, arguing that the pandemic was a government-engineered false flag operation, that vaccines will kill people, and it is all but a part of a grand New World Order plan to exterminate large swaths of the human population. Then, for good measure, Gage has also blamed Bill Gates for this massive conspiracy.

 

To be sure, the examination of the cultural impact of these tragedies on New York City is an excellent idea for a documentary. Why Lee would choose to mar that work by giving the floor to an opportunistic charlatan like Gage is somewhat odd. And I say “somewhat” odd because Lee had often made comments to the effect that he, too, believes in the main tenets of 9/11 conspiracism. He had recited those now debunked theories about jet fuel and steel and controlled demolitions. At one point, sounding spectacularly ignorant, Lee had also said that he hoped there would be a full-scale Congressional investigation into the causes of the collapse of the World Trade towers on 9/11.  Except there has been such an investigation. In fact, it had been carried out between 2002 and 204 by the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, commonly referred to as the 9/11 Commission. So since Lee appears to be a full-fledged fellow traveler of the Richard Gage and Alex Jones conspiracy crowd, it makes sense that he would want to propagate their theories in his documentary. Now my impression of Spike Lee, from what I have read about him in the entertainment news media, is that he is not a stupid man (an assessment I am reconsidering now in light of this controversy) I am stunned that it wouldn’t occur to him how offensive the majority of Americans find Gage and his ilk. There is a reason none of Lee's colleagues in Hollywood have given 9/11 the Oliver Stone “JFK” treatment; because they understand how the 9/11 truthers are a bunch of bottom-feeding ghouls, a collection of grave-robbers attempting to capitalize on the deaths of thousands of Americans. Giving Richard Gage a platform in a documentary like this is akin to someone making a documentary about the Moon landing and giving the flat Earth theorists and the moon-landing-hoax crowd equal time to argue their beliefs. The fact that Lee does not realize this is stunning.

 

But what happens now that Lee had wised up and removed Gage’s segment? Because Lee was foolish enough to put Gage in the documentary to begin with, he has merely been made a martyr for the conspiracy cause. Richard Gage is a now an idealistic “truth seeker” who is being silenced by The Man for getting too close to the dangerous truth. Just like Alex Jones, Gage might be able to appeal to an even bigger legion of those who are delusional and pathologically alienated from the real world. Gage’s acolytes are those who can’t live in the real world and would rather make up their fantasy version of it, a version in which they are smarter, more astute, more vigilant to the hidden truth than all the “sheeple” around them. 

 

The unpleasant irony in this is that the bookend of Lee’s documentary about New York is the COVID pandemic, a plague that has killed so many more people than it should have and a plague that appears to be intensifying once more because of the madness of conspiratorial thinking. The COVID deniers, the anti-vaxxers, the conspiracy theorists ranting about Bill Gates depopulating the world and putting microchips into vaccines and altering the human DNA are driven by the same fantasies fueling the 9/11 derangement. And, yes, I do loath to call the 9/11 conspiracy theorists “truthers.” They are lying parasites who feed off the blood of three thousand and some innocent Americans. The COVID vaccine conspiracy theorists, in turn, are the kinds of people we had seen stand trial for encouraging the mentally unstable to commit suicide.

 

Although, as the article concludes and as I have been writing for years, this entire Spike Lee controversy appears to be bringing a change to the entertainment industry. The conspiracy theorist hero might soon disappear from popular culture. Films, TV shows, and books – just as I had done in my books like CONFIRMATION: INVESTIGATIONS OF THE UNEXPLAINED, and THE CEDAR VALLEY COVENANT – might soon show them to be the villains they really are.

Wednesday, October 21, 2020

QAnon will probably be around for a while...Unfortunately



Check out this recent article I'm quoted in about the future of the QAnon movement. What is the future of this fringe, bizarre, far-right conspiracy movement come the next presidential election? I discuss what might happen to the movement in either the event of Donald Trump's victory or defeat. In either case, I, and several other commentators, don't see QAnon going anywhere any time soon. Perhaps the movement might transform into something new at some point, but it is sure to have more life and more fight left in it.

That's quite unfortunate because they make a case for the fear that our culture might be teetering on the precipice of a new dark age of ignorance. When you take these people together with the 9/11 Truth movement, the anti-vaxxers, the "crisis actor" theorists and the rest of a conspiracy culture, a rational person might start to panic and think humanity has taken leave of its senses.

From a political angle, I think that about 99% percent of those who are center-right, from conservatives to libertarians, look at the QAnon movement as an embarrassment. Trump's tacit endorsement of QAnon is especially galling to these people. Many have lamented the long passing of an age when the right was the home of William F. Buckley's high-toned intellectualism, and they're dreading the coming of a new age when conservatism's voice is being hijacked by loud, irrational, fantasy-prone rabble. 

Friday, October 4, 2019

The Neo-Nazi core of the 9/11 "truther" movement

 
During the recent anniversary of the September 11 attacks, I spent a few days perusing the (all too many) 9/11 “truther” sites and their latest claims of conspiracies and coverups. Now I know what you’re thinking: what do 9/11 conspiracy theorists have to do with the truth. And you’re absolutely right. The inhabitants of the “alternate news” funny-farm have nothing to do with the truth. But just go with me. I did put the word truth in quotes to signify sarcasm.

But I digress from something serious. Perhaps the loudest and dumbest of the “truther”/”alternate news”/conspiracy-theory is no longer even attempting to hide the fact that at the core of this movement is a malignant culture of bigotry and anti-Semitism. So how did you guess that I am writing about the State of the Nation? Although originally the 9/11 conspiracy movement had its fair share of crackpots from the far left—the Bush and Chaney and Haliburton and the military/industrial-complex were behind it all crowd—they had eventually become outnumbered by the anti-Semitic, anti-Israeli far-right Neo-Nazi lunatics. These are the people who believe that the attacks were staged to start wars against Arab nations at the behest of Israel. This is the crowd that used to advance the thoroughly discredited, baseless assertion that Jewish employees of the World Trade towers were told to stay home from work on 9/11.

State of the Nation, of course, still advances this theory, along with every other theory about Jewish cabals, world-wide Zionist subversion, and so on and so on. In fact, if you visit this website, you’ll find a massive, putrid electronic garbage dump of alt-right talking points and links to various Holocaust denying Neo-Nazi sites.

For a closer look, scroll through the archives of SOTN on the right side of their page and look for the following links:

The real 9/11 perps outed – yes, it’s all the usual suspects!”  Spoiler alert: the usual suspects the article talks about are Jews.








Perhaps the most repugnant of these links is the last one above, the “crazy tribe” piece. It originates from a virulently anti-Semitic site full of more links to Holocaust-denying books and various sundry bits of fascist propaganda.

And do pay close attention of the content in the “crazy tribe” article. At first, of course, you will notice the grotesque caricature of a Jew. With the large, hooked nose, its sneer, it looks exactly like it could have been lifted from an anti-Semitic propaganda poster in Nazi Germany. But then you must understand the article’s content. It lists incidents throughout history where Jews had been oppressed and expelled from lands as a matter of official state policy. The title of the piece implies, of course, that the “crazy tribe” must somehow have deserved these pogroms. They must obviously be at fault if they had been oppressed so often.

So yes, the legacy of 9/11 must include a quest for the truth. The real truth is that a barbaric attack on the United States by Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda terrorists is being exploited by hate mongers and home-grown Nazis. Another enemy is attacking the U.S. now and they are called conspiracy theorists, “truthers,” and the purveyors of “alternative news.” These people need to be exposed, opposed, and, as the FBI correctly stated not too long ago, called the terrorists they are.

Thursday, June 20, 2019

Sandy Hook "truther" James Fetzer loses libel suit. Good!


All words have consequences and now the conspiracy community is learning it the hard way – finally – in court, according to this story. A Wisconsin judge just found conspiracy theorist James Fetzer guilty of libeling Leonard Pozner, the father of one of the children murdered in the Sandy Hook mass shooting of 2012.

The details of this case are so repugnant that it’s impossible, I think, to have any kind of a measured, civil discussion of who James Fetzer is and what he was sued for. As the NY Times story outlines, Fetzer wrote a book arguing that the Sandy Hook massacre was a “false flag” attack, a hoax perpetrated by some government cabal to use as a pretense for cracking down on gun-ownership rights. By that account, of course, all of the grieving families, friends, and coworkers of the children and staff members who were killed at Sandy Hook Elementary School were liars and “crisis actors,” coconspirators of the shadowy evil cabal. Thus Fetzer got hit with a well-deserved libel suit and now he has, thankfully, lost the case.

The only evil perpetrated in this case, of course, was the one by Fetzer, his co-author, and his publisher. First, arguing that no shooting took place at Sandy Hook is mind-boggling in its sheer callousness. Not only does what they describe – or any of the arguments made by all the other “truther” bottom-feeders like the State of the Nation web page, Alex Jones, the Millennium Report, or the rest of their slimy ilk – defy all logic and common sense, but it’s virtually unfathomable how insensitive it is to the pain of these families. Faking a mass shooting at a school in the middle of a community like Newtown, Connecticut, is impossible. Period! It is just as impossible as the 9/11 conspiracy theories, the vaccination conspiracy theories, and the flat Earth conspiracy theories an ever-growing subculture of the alienated, mentally unstable, psychotic, and pathologically unstable believe in these days. But the fact that Fetzer would use the death of children to make money off of, that he would continually encourage the harassment of people like Leonard Pozner, is an act of inhuman depravity that could only be born of the mind of a sociopath. 

But a quick review of Fetzer’s background reveals that none of what he did with the Sandy Hook tragedy should be of surprise. He is, after all, one of the stars of the 9/11 conspiracy movement. A quick Google of his name will provide a wealth of information about his background, including his founding of the Scholars for 9/11 Truth organization in 2005. The fascinating thing about Scholars for 9/11 Truth is that by 2006 the group saw a schism, where a sizable faction of its members – and no, most of them are not scholars, and the few that are have mostly scholarly credentials like an expertise in horticulture, art, or literary analysis – decided to break away and start their own group, Scholars for 9/11 Truth and Justice. Their problem with Fetzer, they said, was that he wanted to keep an open mind to and include such lunatic theories like the World Trade Center towers being destroyed by lasers from space or mini nuclear weapons.

Again, sorry for the incivility, but you can see what happened to Fetzer, right? He was deemed too batshit-crazy for even the average 9/11 conspiracy theorists.

Since then, Fetzer has never met a conspiracy theory he didn’t like. Aside from the 9/11 derangement, he has endorsed the Moon-landing hoax theory, various harebrained JFK conspiracy theories, and has been friendly to various Holocaust-denier and world-Jewish-conspiracy theories. A true, class act, right?

Also it’s worth remarking about something unfortunate concerning Fetzer. From the 1970s until the 1990s, he actually had a legitimate academic career. He is today a professor emeritus of the philosophy of science at the University of Minnesota, Duluth. Cranks, fringe kooks, and the utterly unscrupulous, do turn up in academia as well from time to time. Intelligence, unfortunately, does not always rule out a lack of morals and conscience…or sometimes just plain mental illness. The Fetzers of academia, thankfully, however, are kept to a minimum by the nature of that business. And Fetzer’s descent into conspiracy theorist batshit-craziness only started after his retirement as a full-time faculty member. With age, one can suppose, the body is not always the first to go. Or maybe he just needed a little extra retirement income and he realized there was an a big enough audience out there to pay for books and videos about 9/11 and crisis actor conspiracy theories, no matter how ludicrous these theories may be.

But aside from celebrating Leonard Pozner's victory, we must also laud his other activism against this predatory, destructive conspiracy culture that is pushing American society ever closer to a new dark age of irrationality and mindless paranoia. Pozner also founded the HONR Network, dedicated to fighting back against online harassment and challenging the malicious lies of conspiracy theorists. As Pozner argues so correctly, conspiracy theories can’t be ignored because they will not fade away on their own. These theories are kept alive by the Internet and they spread like a vicious cancer until they erase real history. 

Do check out the HONR Network’s web page right here and support its mission.

It’s time that the tide began to turn against the terrorists of the conspiracy theory community and the people who should start living in fear – in fear of the exposure of their unconscionable lies – are the Fetzers of this world and the rest of their kind in the “truther” community.

Tuesday, March 5, 2019

Not sure if I should laugh or cry.


So here's a link to YET ANOTHER major study verifying what the scientific community has known for a long time: there is absolutely no evidence whatsoever to suggest that measles vaccines cause autism. Case closed!

Except given the state our modern world is in - and not just America society, but many other countries in the world where we've been seeing measles outbreaks - will this make much of a difference to an ever-growing segment of the population that likes to make up its own facts and create its own belief systems completely unconnected to any empirical evidence? I fear that the answer to that might be..."not likely."

I'm as pessimistic as I am because I recently watched a fascinating, hilarious, frightening, absurd, disheartening documentary on Netflix called "Behind the Curve." It focuses on that other great modern derangement I've been writing about here, the flat Earth movement. The documentary is quite fair to the flat Earthers, actually, as it lets them tell their story in their own words. We see some of the thought-leaders of the flat Earth movement as they explain their beliefs and why they came to believe what they do.

Now the idea that the Earth is flat I will just leave in the same category as the "Pizzagate" conspiracy and the Qanon conspiracy. It is so staggeringly absurd that it's not worth spending the time addressing all of its claims.

What makes the documentary especially fascinating, though, is when we see how this monumental foolishness serves as a magnet, a community, and a surrogate family for people who are and always have been, for whatever reason, completely alienated from consensus reality and any organization or institution of expertise. We see these people congregate in online communities - when they don't get together at actual conventions - and spin their wild yarns of a massive, world-wide conspiracy to hide the truth about the real shape of the Earth. We also see how the people who make up this zany movement already have a propensity for paranoia and for living in their own self-made fantasy worlds. The stars, if you will, of the flat Earth movement profiled in "Behind the Curve," people like Patricia Steere or Mark Sargent, are also staunch believers in vast collection of other conspiracies, everything from 9/11 trutherism to flase-flag-attack theories and all the way to the vaccine conspiracy theories.

But a really sad part of this documentary is when we see people who take their kids to the flat Earth conventions, who teach them to believe in this archaic, utterly unrealistic load of demented nonsense. In my eyes, the behavior of those parents borders on child abuse. It borders on child abuse as much as the behavior of parents who refuse to give their children vaccines. It makes me want to scream that if children can be removed by authorities from families where they are beaten, starved, and tortured, why shouldn't they be taken away from parents who refuse to vaccinate them? Or who indoctrinate them in idiocy like the flat Earth beliefs. That, of course, will never happen. But sometimes it really makes me wish!

So what about our new study debunking the vaccines/autism link yet again? Is there reason to believe it will change minds?

I hope so.

But, then again, when we still have flat Earthers despite all the evidence...

Wednesday, March 21, 2018

Mammas Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up to be Conspiracy Theorists


I am quoted in this article about a new study into the psychology of conspiracy beliefs. It's fascinating to read that insecurities kindled in people from the time they are infants will shape their predisposition to believe in fantastic, irrational, and unrealistic claims of massive conspiracy theories later in life. These findings are not surprising, though, as a growing body of research has been affirming that people who tend to be the biggest fans of the most outlandish conspiracy theories are also those who feel the most powerless, alienated, and insecure. "Individuals with anxious attachment are preoccupied with their security, tend to hold a negative view of outgroups, are more sensitive to threats, and tend to exaggerate the seriousness of such threats," the study says.

Raising well-adjusted children who are given adequate feelings of security and control in their lives might be a good start to help keep us from raising another generation of kids who will believe that the Earth if flat, that LBJ, J. Edgar Hoover, the Dallas police, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, aliens, oil billionaires, Elvis Presley, Oliver North using a time machine, Frank Sinatra, and John Wayne shooting from the grassy knoll killed JFK.

Moreover, as I argue in the article, the educational system needs to do its part in teaching logic, critical thinking skills, and media literacy skills to help young people deconstruct the messages of paranoia hucksters like Alex Jones and the flat Earthers, to understand all of the underhanded and unethical communication tactics conspiracy theorists use to convince the gullible and unwary of everything from "crisis actor" conspiracy theories to the fantasies of the anti-vaccination crowd.

I incorporate such exercises in the class I teach about conspiracy films and American culture at Saint Peter's University. In their semester projects, students need to manufacture their own conspiracy, creating one using tactics such as the reverse scientific process to cherry-pick facts that support preconceived notions, inaccurately assigning causality between unrelated variables, and launching all manner of character assassinations against one's critics. Once students can see how easy it is to create vast conspiracies where none exist, they should hopefully be able to recognize all the flat Earth theories, Moon landing hoax theories, and 9/11 Truther claims for the simple parlor tricks they are.