I'm back...and so are the 9/11 troofers
Spike Lee's new HBO series revives discredited conspiracy nonsense about the September 11 attacks.
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In his memoir, the late John Crosbie said you can tell who the Newfoundlanders are in Heaven, because they all want to go home.
Terra Nova National Park:
Bowring Park, St. John’s:
Bay Bulls:
And̶ B̶i̶r̶d̶e̶m̶i̶c̶ Witless Bay Ecological Reserve, which is basically Panama City on Spring Break for hundreds of thousands of seabirds, especially puffins:
COVID kept me away for two years, but I won’t let it be another two years before I return.
With the twentieth anniversary of September 11 approaching, the exceptionally talented and exceptionally frustrating filmmaker Spike Lee decided it was the perfect time to bring 9/11 conspiracy theories out of hibernation and onto HBO:
On Monday, the New York Times reported that Spike Lee devotes a significant amount of time in his new four-part HBO documentary series, NYC Epicenters 9/11–2021½, to the group Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth, which promotes the conspiracy theory that the Twin Towers were brought down by a controlled demolition as part of an inside job.
About a decade ago, I interviewed Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth founder Richard Gage multiple times and attended one of his events for articles in Slate and Architect Magazine. Gage is responsible for peddling some of the most pernicious and long-running lies about the 9/11 attacks, which is why I was surprised that Lee, HBO, and WarnerMedia might be lending his group any amount of time.
I had to see for myself to what extent Lee’s documentary actually promoted Gage’s fantasies, so I checked out a screener for Episode 4, which is due to be released around the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. What I found was surreal and demoralizing.
Lee devotes 30 minutes near the very end of his series to relitigating arguments that have been debunked a thousand times. Specifically, he presents about a dozen conspiracy theorists and members of Gage’s group, including Gage himself, in a back-and-forth with three credible scientists who investigated the 9/11 attacks in a teach the controversy–style format that presents the truth behind 9/11 as an open debate between two equally valid sides. In terms of conveying facts, this is a bit like presenting COVID-19 vaccine skeptics in a debate alongside Anthony Fauci, or Holocaust deniers alongside the Simon Wiesenthal Center, or a clique of climate change skeptics alongside the authors of the United Nations IPCC report.
[…]
In the documentary, Lee is presented with an explanation of the facts by Shyam Sunder, who led 200 scientists in examining the evidence of the 9/11 attacks to produce a three-year-long, $16 million investigation into the collapse of the World Trade Center for the National Institute of Standards and Technology. When Sunder finishes and says, “Hopefully that answers your question,” Lee laughs and responds, “Well, not really.” Interspersed through that part of the film are Gage and members of his group promoting falsehoods that the buildings could only have been brought down by a controlled demolition, citing faulty premises about “jet fuel” and “evidence of explosions” and repeating the claim that “Building 7 is the smoking gun of 9/11.” Ultimately, Lee calls for a new congressional investigation into how the towers came down. “I hope that maybe the legacy of this documentary is that Congress holds a hearing, a congressional hearing about 9/11,” he told the Times.
You might be wondering why it matters if Spike Lee is raising questions about the official story of 9/11, particularly given that most of the “evidence” he presents is perhaps most well-known at this point because of mocking teen memes from the mid-2010s.
But Lee and HBO are offering Gage and his conspiracy theories the biggest and most mainstream platform they’ve ever had, pointing their viewers directly towards a bog of heinously dangerous ideas: Like other conspiracy theorists, Gage doesn’t just stick to 9/11, and if Lee’s viewers follow Gage down the rabbit hole, they likely won’t, either.
Take a wild guess who Gage believes to be the ultimate masterminds behind the devious 9/11 inside job. Go ahead, guess. You won’t believe it.
When you listen closely to Gage and attend his events, other alleged criminals start to emerge. Chief among them: Jews. When I visited one of his group’s gatherings in 2012, he offered an open platform to participants claiming “that our government and the Israeli government, the Israeli Mossad, could be responsible for the Twin Towers demolition.” In one recent interview, Gage endorsed the ideas of a podcast host who said that Israel’s use of COVID-19 passports means that it “has the database that collects all of our phone calls” and that “Israel benefited” from 9/11 and “it’s pretty obvious who” the real perpetrators of the attacks were. In response to the podcast host essentially suggesting the Jews did it, Gage responded: “It’s not too difficult to figure that out. You just have to listen to some really, really good people—your station, which I’ve heard many times, your TV or video exposés are extraordinary.” The 9/11 truther movement is awash in this sort of antisemitism, and Gage seemingly never disputes it.
Might be time to re-examine Mo’ Better Blues again.
There is a silver lining to Spike Lee exhuming this bullshit, because it gives us a test case to see just how serious we are about pushing back against harmful conspiracy theories. Donald Trump was banned from major social media platforms for his insistence that he won the 2020 Presidential election, a conspiracy theory almost as ridiculous as the one about 9/11 being an inside job. HBO itself produced an excellent documentary series examining the Trump-adjacent QAnon movement. Right-thinking people everywhere have pronounced such conspiracism unacceptable, harmful misinformation that could - as we saw on January 6 - result in violence.
Now we have a prominent person with a very different political agenda promoting his own harmful misinformation. And we will soon see if our media gatekeepers condemn it or excuse and apologize for it.
Rest in peace, Charlie Watts.