Aloha! 9/11 was Not an Inside Job
Aloha! 9/11 was Not an Inside Job
A quick Jackal update from Hawaii.
Happy Friday my beautiful babies. I hope you’ve all had a great week. I am currently in Hawaii with the family, where we are doing a beach vacation for the first time in more than two years. We are enjoying ourselves, but it is really hard to get past all the ugliness. Hawaii is absolutely not picturesque, beautiful, and perfect. Anyone who tells you that lying.
I wanted to do a (really) quick Jackal because of the big news this week: A jury in Connecticut is determining how much money Alex Jones will have to pay for defaming the parents of children who were murdered in the Sandy Hook school shooting (it’s already been determined that Jones is guilty; this is just to calculate damages).
Jones has become more popular in the past five or six years, mostly because of his proximity to Donald Trump, but also because his popularity exploded during COVID-19, which was a boon for conspiracy theorists all over the world.
There is really no lie that is too odious for Jones to latch on to, but his behavior in the Sandy Hook massacre was particularly terrible. There was powerful testimony from one of the parents, who said Jones’s accusations that she was an actor who never actually lost her child made her life a living hell. Many of the Sandy Hook parents have needed private security and/or have changed their names to avoid harassment from Jones’s followers. Hopefully the jury (which has also been attacked by Jones on his show) issues him the heaviest penalty possible.
I have followed Jones for a really long time. While I was in college, we had a new professor join us one year, John Cobin. He was hired to teach politics and economics, but made waves pretty early on when he endorsed the 9/11 conspiracy theory that there was a controlled demolition that destroyed the towers, and that it wasn’t Al Qaeda. For some reason, the U.S. government decided to fake an attack on the World Trade Center, so they could invade Iraq under the pretense of looking for Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD). Ignore the fact that producing fake WMDs would probably be child’s play for a government that blew up two of its most famous and public buildings. Cobin did when I tried to point that out to him. He showed Loose Change, a “documentary” that detailed the controlled demolition theory, and fought with the students in his class (mostly me).
As the son of a construction worker who actually worked on the World Trade Center, I had heard many stories about how the Twin Towers were designed to collapse into their own footprint. I knew that the controlled demolition theory was a joke, but the fact that I was in my early twenties and already had a good sense that Cobin was an idiot wasn’t a good sign for me believing the conspiracy anyway. Cobin was fired by the college halfway through the semester after casually expressing holocaust denial, on top of all his other conspiracies. His termination also coincided with his arrest for domestic abuse, though the school never officially cited that as a reason. Thereafter, Cobin moved to Chile and is currently serving a 6-year sentence for shooting at protestors.
This personal history got me into the 9/11 Truth movement, which (back then) centered heavily around Alex Jones. I was there when Jones got humiliated by a semi-infamous 9/11 conspiracy debunker, Mark Roberts, on the tenth anniversary of September 11th. Roberts was an NYC tour guide who used to doggedly debate the conspiracists who surrounded the site of the attack, back when the base of the Freedom Tower was called “Ground Zero.” I followed around a New York-based 9/11 conspiracy group, We Are Change, which was headed up by Luke Rudkowski, who has since moderated his image. It was particularly funny to me that Rudkowski believed the U.S. government was inherently evil and trying to kill its own citizens, but openly admitted to me that he was collecting unemployment.
I got to watch the 9/11 Truth Movement balloon from a small, niche group of wackos into an entire industry that probably makes hundreds of millions of dollars a year. And it has only become more popular over time, even though some of the founders of the movement - like the producers of Loose Change - have either rescinded or abandoned their views. Some, like Rudkowski and Jones, have just moved on to other conspiracies and have made a living out of it.
So, now we get to the kicker: Like a lot of conspiracies, the 9/11 Truth Movement tried to give itself an air of legitimacy by forming groups like, “Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth.” It was supposedly a list of “serious” experts who all endorsed the 9/11 controlled demolition theory. Let’s put it this way: I was pretty skeptical that it was a legitimate organization, so I decided to verify it the traditional way, which was lying about being an engineer and seeing if they’d add me to the list without checking. As it stands, I am currently on the list of “Architects and Engineers” who endorse the controlled demolition theory:
Their verification process consisted of calling the wrong number I gave them (which was a friend’s), having him tell them they had the wrong number, and then adding me to the list anyway. Thorough! But it’s also emblematic of the general incompetence of conspiracy theorists, who are easily duped and willing to believe almost anything you tell them.
That’s my personal story about Jones. See you all when I get back from vacation. As a fun bonus, Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth is still texting my friend, even after he has told them multiple times that he is not David Podhaskie, the engineer from Long Island.
