9/11 and QAnon: The Very Real Horror Behind “The Truth”
On the 19th anniversary, a former 9/11 ‘Truther’ outlines why QAnon is capturing Gen Z and Boomers alike.
I would like to begin by telling you that I secured an interview with a long-sought-after, shady recluse with all the answers. A conspiracy nut who operates in the shadows, maybe lives in the woods and quotes at length from meticulous research, or tries to convince me of the pattern mapped out in newspaper cuttings on their pin-board. Someone on the fringes of society, away from the normal, boring, sensible folk like you and I. But unfortunately, the former ‘9/11 Truther’ I’m talking about is me.
I stress, former. I don’t believe in 9/11 conspiracy theories. I am still deeply interested by conspiracy theory, and confusing facts about the events surrounding 9/11 still occupy my mind from time to time. But for a while, when I was young(er), I was gripped by the 9/11 conspiracy narrative. And now — I have to admit, with more than a bit of guilt — I’m still gripped by the trauma, the very real, undeniable horror of what frequently came to be known in the ’00s as ‘that day’. Many of the millennials, Gen Xers and Boomers who lived through it are.
Many are becoming ever more fascinated with other, various horrors — some through the lens of extreme social media conspiracy-posting. Today, we are all obsessed misery-scrollers deluged with conspiracy — from a wonk’s trip to a crumbling castle in the English countryside to the QAnon movement’s assertion that rich people in various positions on The Left are satanic cannibalistic pedophiles, who control the banks and the media, and operate out of pizza parlors and online furniture outlets.
How did we get from your average ‘the-government-assassinated-JFK’ theory to here?
I’m Not Okay (I Promise)
I was 12 in September 2001 and on ‘that day’, my childhood obsession with all things morbid and supernatural crashed into an even more terrifying and spectacular reality. For a while afterward, as video hosting sites such as Google Video proliferated online and British schools did not yet have the wherewithal to block them, I would revisit videos of the towers collapsing while classmates around me openly baffled at how I was spending our I.T. lesson. Awe-struck and harrowed, I felt that if I could just see it all, get enough information, I could make it make sense. Videos of the event were a finite resource — after a while, there was nothing I hadn’t seen. In the meantime, I — a 12, 13, 14-year-old — had seen up-close footage of a person attempting to get help by leaning out of a window and waving, but instead falling to their death. I had seen photos of half a body on the pavement, the other half pulverized by the impact.
Then 9/11 conspiracy documentaries began appearing. Here was ‘the rest of’ the information, that gave me a path — if not a way to act on the information then at least to understand why and how it had happened. I ‘understood’ the US government better than I did jihadists, after all.
Later on at University, I would write a dissertation on 9/11 conspiracy documentaries — the study of which frog-marched me back to reality, as I sheepishly acknowledged the inconsistencies and emotional manipulation at their core, and returned to my place amongst the rest of The Sheeple.
I didn’t know until recently that 9/11 ‘Truthers’, as they came to be known, were still around in any real way. We’ve all met a die-hard conspiracist who believes that anything and everything is a top-down, government-controlled scam, and always will. But as I recently became aware of the QAnon phenomenon — following the same morbid impulse teenage me had in I.T. lessons — I was surprised to see a number of the same characters. Luke Rudkowski of ‘We Are Change NYC’ started out as a 9/11 Truther and is now a full anti-globalist, Hollywood-pedophile-exposing, climate-change-denier; the now infamous Trump-loving, Sandy Hook-defaming Alex Jones’ local Texan following was made global by the ‘9/11 Truth Movement’. The same people whose clunky, badly-fonted blog posts had drawn my suspicious fascination 15 years ago are still operating — only now they have hundreds of thousands of Twitter followers, and I am older and less frequently stoned, and therefore far less susceptible to their message.
The 9/11 Content Factory
Conspiracy theories are not an internet phenomenon, but the internet turned modern conspiracies (such as ‘JFK’ or ‘the moon landings’) into new, rhizomatic theories on fentanyl-laced steroids. Where Oliver Stone made just one of 1991's flawed-but-convincing feature JFK, hundreds of 9/11 conspiracy documentaries and websites proliferated online in just a couple of years. Many online documentary sites list ‘9/11’ as its own category, outside of history, politics, war. Most of the films listed are those conspiracy films made in the mid-2000s.
The most popular of these to date is unarguably Loose Change, of which several versions exist (the first released in 2005) and from which a viral response exploded. Vanity Fair famously called the film “the first internet blockbuster”. Politicians, media figures, and other filmmakers would come to discuss it openly in the positive — Kevin Smith called it “fucking riveting” and David Lynch said it made you “look at what you thought you saw in a different light.” John McDermott has written an excellent history of Loose Change for Esquire, in which you can find a link to (but no explicit discussion of) another, more broad conspiracy film: Zeitgeist: The Movie.
The [Lizards?] Control Everything
Zeitgeist uses the 9/11 conspiracy as a single chapter in a larger conspiracy narrative about the shady cabal of rich people who control the world. Itwas, like Loose Change, a series with several iterations, and a similar narrative structure with identical logic jumps. In Zeitgeist, we can more clearly see the larger over-arching Illuminati/Bilderburg/thinly-veiled anti-Semitic ‘puppet-master’ theory linking Judeo-Christian religion, central banking practices, 9/11 and ‘other false-flag attacks’ perpetrated by a global elite, to maintain the ‘New World Order’.
Whereas Loose Change’s versions reiterate, update and refine the same information about 9/11 specifically, Zeitgeist gets ever broader as the later films progress — it pushes further into the ‘utopian tech solutions’ idea; somewhat anarchic, somewhat Libertarian visions of ever-harmonious ideal societies with green energy and Universal Basic Income, in which addiction and crime, and the imbalances of hierarchical power, can be entirely eliminated. If that pesky elite can just somehow be eliminated, then we normal folk can be safe and free.
A comforting distraction of an idea, no matter if you’re on the left OR right — two wings of the same bird: corruption.
This same ‘elites control the world’ idea underpins QAnon’s overarching, confusing, spiraling conspiracy theory, with added sexual predation. Zeitgeist director Peter Joseph calls them ‘The Men Behind the Curtain’. David Icke called them Lizard People from space. QAnon believers call them Democrats, and think that Trump is the saviour who will bring us to their version of utopia: ‘The Great Awakening’.
The core of these ideas remains the same, as the details get ever zanier. And the reason that this corrupt, terrifying ‘elites’ idea won’t go away is because, at its core, it’s not wrong.
I’m Okay Now (Sort Of)
I don’t believe in any conspiracy theories today. But I understand why the details of Pizzagate and Wayfair, and supernatural satanic elements, have gripped far too many people. The QAnon phenomenon is not a minor-league joke that we can sweep under the carpet. But it is a distracting, convenient panacea for real issues— and that’s why it’s so successful at gripping those who subscribe to it, as well as those of us who don’t. It’s why you might see a friend sharing a ‘save the children’ post, even though you’re pretty sure he doesn’t believe Trump is any kind of saviour, or even a legitimate President.
Google ‘conspiracy theory’ and you’ll pull up thousands of articles and research papers telling you that the reason conspiracy theories are so pervasive and convincing is that we need to make sense of a chaotic world. It’s not real, don’t worry, it’s just a coping mechanism. Well, agreed —but let’s return to that premise for a second, that theories of conspiracy are ‘not real’ and we ‘shouldn’t worry’.
I, and my 12-year-old friends, watched 9/11 happen live. And then we watched it happen over and over and over again on Google Video, and later YouTube, because we could. There’s a reason we refer to ‘a post-9/11 world’ as one always on-edge, easily triggered and irrational. It’s not only a result of the collective trauma of 9/11, the War on Terror, and the financial inequalities that ballooned alongside them, but also the way that the internet allows for the very real chaos and brutality of the post-9/11 world to be instantly and always amplified — both in real and perceived ways.
A 12-year-old in 1963 might have been harrowed by the Zapruder film, IF they saw it. Today a 12-year-old can watch the Zapruder film over and over again on any one of their personal devices, and then switch over to the extremely violent and sometimes non-consensual pornography, often featuring teenagers, that rises to the front page of PornHub.
Jeffrey Epstein and Jimmy Saville sexually assaulted young, vulnerable people for decades, often protected — at best, ignored — by other wealthy, powerful and high profile individuals who knew it was happening. So have numerous others in the church, in politics, in business.
Families in chronic poverty are unable, for generations, to get out from under the boot of debt, while the world’s richest man is now worth more than 125 of the world’s 195 countries.
We haven’t even touched on climate change (who has, what with everything that’s been going on) or the pandemic. It’s enough to radicalise anyone — well, anyone struggling with mental health, anger issues, or a significant emotional void, perhaps. And that’s a lot of people in the post-9/11 world.
This isn’t a recent breakdown of power and governance. It is a continuation, proliferation, and deeply-stressed expansion of long-standing inequity and corruption. And information about it — “it”, as though it is one ‘thing’ —is made ever more visible, and yet unreliable, by the internet.
What might seem to those holding it together like the ultimate over-egged moral panic, has kernels of truth so pervasive and entrenched that it’s easier to be distracted by the strange or simplistic. To stare wide-eyed at a news report of Pizzagate, say “whoa”… and go back to your video game. Rather that than meditate on the fact that pedophile rings do exist and there’s little you can do about it. Whether or not you believe they’re attended by lizards, or you use them to promote your anti-Semitic agenda, the Bilderberg meetings continue to take place every year, and the average person continues to get poorer.
And so moral panics and social problems continue, while we busy ourselves with getting a paycheck, Netflix, and wild theories of how all this could possibly be neatly solved. Because when racism, domestic violence and poverty are all shown to be inextricably embedded in policing practices, who are we supposed to call on to solve it? It’s going to have to be…politicians I guess?
There’s an extent to which we can only beat madness by admitting our powerlessness. A central premise in many addiction, and therapeutic programmes. Those who believe in something as crazy as QAnon are making a last grasp for power and sense in a world where neither feel available to them. It’s an unconscious strategy to stop them from crumbling.
Well, thanks, that’s depressing.
Sorry. This is a very 21st-century phenomenon, but one that has roots as far back as inequality and corruption have existed, bloated by globally-connected yet ever-more-alienated and atomised 21st-century people. QAnon is a panicky, structurally-broken, postmodern theory, to the fairly straightforward, resigned, and ‘modern’ JFK one — and as long as actual corruption exists, so will conspiracy theory.
In the post-9/11 world, collective trauma and discussion of ‘triggers’ abound. Young people have a new language to describe the increasing exposure, both vicariously via a screen and in tangible, slow, personal ways, to the ‘unsafe world’. Helaina Hovitz, who is the same age as me, wrote a book about her first-person experience of 9/11 — she went to middle school around the corner from the World Trade Center and, on attempting to return home that morning would be repeatedly redirected by confused police, and forced to flee both collapses from just a few streets away.
At an online event with the NY Adventure Club today, she discussed the ongoing trauma she experienced after the event itself, living for several months in a neighbourhood covered in toxic dust with everyday police and army presence. She also referred to the fear that came from the constant discussion of ‘threat levels’, stories of the disastrous War on Terror, and the 24-hour news cycle that delivered them. Millennials whose formative years were backdropped by constant ‘threat’ are now still trying to find their adult selves in a precarious and unpredictable world. Asked if she believes in collective trauma for those who didn’t experience the event directly, she responded that yes, she does. And she added that over the past decade: “[My friends and I] believed we needed to constantly watch the news to keep ourselves safe […] I just stopped.”
On the 19th anniversary of 9/11, I’ll probably be trying and failing to spend less time watching the news — or ‘be anywhere’ on the internet, gawping at or ignoring the state of the world. By the next anniversary, maybe I’ll be more active in grassroots community campaigning, learning new skills, and finally finishing my works-in-progress. Maybe that connection with real, regular people, useful, workable ideas, and integrity will make me less anxious about the shady cabal of rich, incompetent people who control everything. We’ll see.
If we are able to go outside by then, that is.