How 9/11 Made Everyone a Conspiracy Theorist

There are many, many strange things about the stew of conspiracy theories that fall under the umbrella of “9/11 Truth”—the false, often antisemitic worldview purporting that the US government had inside knowledge of or even actively participated in the September 11 attacks. But perhaps the strangest is that the seed of these theories was planted three months before the attacks themselves.

It was June 28, 2001, when Milton William “Bill” Cooper took to the air on his national radio show after watching a news report on CNN. “Supposedly, a CNN reporter found Osama bin Laden, took a television camera crew with him, went into Osama bin Laden's hideout, interviewed him and his top leadership, his top lieutenants and colonels and generals in their hideout,” Cooper told his listeners. “He came out and told everybody, ‘Within three weeks, Osama bin Laden is going to attack the United States and Israel.’”

Cooper had part of the story right—a reporter had indeed just reached the inner sanctum of al Qaeda in the mountains near Kandahar, Afghanistan, but he was actually a correspondent for a Middle Eastern broadcaster. And that reporter, the MBC correspondent Baker Atyani, had actually interviewed al Qaeda’s military chief, Mohammed Atif, not bin Laden. “In the coming weeks, there will be a big surprise; we are going to hit American and Israeli installations,” Atif told Atyani. “The coffin business will increase in the United States.” According to Atyani, bin Laden—who was present for the interview—smiled and nodded.

To Cooper, speaking on the radio that day, the interview represented either a major embarrassment for the US government, which had been hunting bin Laden for years, or it was evidence that the government was lying about the threat from bin Laden.

“Now, don’t you think that’s kind of strange, folks?” Cooper said. “The largest intelligence apparatus in the world, with the biggest budget in the history of the world, has been looking for Osama bin Laden for years and years and years and can't find him. The FBI, also under the leadership of Louis Freeh, has been looking for Osama bin Laden for years and years and years and years and years and many years and can’t find him. Some doofus jerk-off reporter with a camera crew waltzes right into his hideout and interviews him?”

“Now that tells us two things: Either everyone in the intelligence community and all of the intelligence agencies of the United States government are blithering idiots and incompetent fools, including the entire apparatus of the FBI and all of their personnel—or they're lying to us. They're not looking for him at all.”

Cooper went on to say that “the CIA created Osama bin Laden” and that “they're now using him to help bring about world government by making him the big boogeyman because they can't use [Iraqi dictator] Saddam Hussein anymore.”

Cooper argued that the whole threat from bin Laden was a farce—what would now be called a “false flag” operation. “If you believe it, you are one of the stupidest jerks that ever lived on the face of this earth, and whatever’s going to happen they’re going to blame on Osama bin Laden.”

About 10 weeks later, Cooper’s comment would come to be seen as a prophecy.

The events and aftermath of 9/11 altered almost every aspect of American society: from the ever-present security theater of daily life—the 3.4-ounce liquid bottles at airports, the defensive bollards that now dominate so many urban landscapes—to the expansion of the surveillance state, to 20 years of war in Afghanistan, to the backdrop of fear and anxiety that permeates the culture. Few, though, rightly recognize one of the most important and pernicious impacts of 9/11: how it changed our society’s very understanding and relationship to facts and truth.

It’s a story that not many people fully understand, one with roots in the UFO conspiracies of the 1980s and with tentacles that stretch to the National Mall on January 6, 2021—and one that helps in particular to explain the transformation of Alex Jones from a fringe Austin, Texas, talk show host to one of the most important (and disruptive) political forces of the 21st century. This transformation began in the first minutes after the September 11 attacks.

Cooper first came to prominence in the 1980s, among the first of a group who would come to be known as “UFO whistleblowers,” former military or intelligence veterans who purported to have insider knowledge about the government’s cover-up of alien civilizations, captured spacecraft, and recovered alien life-forms. It was the first golden age of modern conspiracism, as trust in government cratered following Vietnam, Watergate, and the revelations of dark assassination plots by the Pike and Church committees; books about cover-ups and urban legends like the Bermuda Triangle and the “Philadelphia Experiment” became bestsellers.

Cooper claimed to have been a naval intelligence officer in the 1970s and said that, as part of his work with a high-ranking admiral, he’d been able to covertly paw through the contents of the admiral’s cabinet of classified material. As Colin Dickey wrote in a review of a Cooper biography, the cabinet became “a repository of secrets known only to Cooper, whose contents seemed to change and evolve over the years, fitting whatever need Cooper’s current conspiracies had.” In early iterations, Cooper hinted it contained the truth about the JFK assassination and the government’s contact with aliens.

In the 1990s, amid the rise of far-right talk shows like that of Rush Limbaugh, Cooper became a national radio figure as well; his shortwave The Hour of the Time focused on a witches’ brew of sinister government conspiracies, alternate histories, warnings about the New World Order and secret societies, and a healthy dose of general-purpose skepticism; Cooper often exhorted his audience, “Wake up, sheeple!” (Much of his conspiracism contained thinly and not-so-thinly veiled antisemitism.)

For a brief period, Cooper was one of the nation’s most famous “UFO-ologists,” but few believed him—he feuded frequently with others in the field. He eventually laid out a grand conspiracy account in his 1991 memoir/fever-dream of a book, Behold a Pale Horse.

Behold a Pale Horse is a wacky piece of writing—there’s almost no other word for it. At one point it quotes the entire text of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a fabricated antisemitic screed from the early 1900s that alleged a secret Jewish plot to overthrow Christianity. Cooper’s work was basically QAnon three decades early, outlining a vast global conspiracy, decades-long and all-encompassing, to steal America and our freedoms from real Americans, all to serve some global super elite. The book became an underground bestseller—it still is today—and took off particularly within the militia movement.

This newfound fame coincided with the start of his talk radio career on WWCR, World Wide Christian Radio, in January 1993. With a 100,000-watt signal, he could reach huge swaths of the country from his home in Arizona. And over time, Cooper developed two important—and later infamous—superfans. One was a young Gulf War veteran named Timothy McVeigh, who in the early spring of 1995 journeyed with a companion—their exact identity is disputed—to Arizona to try to talk to Cooper at his home. “The last thing he said before they left in their green Mercury Marquis station wagon with a puke-yellow interior was, ‘Watch Oklahoma City,’” Cooper would later recount. Soon after their meeting, McVeigh attacked the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building, killing 168 people and injuring nearly 700.

Then there was Alex Jones, a local public-access talk show host in Austin, Texas, who first came onto the national radar for his fundraising work to rebuild the church at the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas. The site had burned down in 1993 at the end of a 51-day siege by the US government, as federal agents tried to arrest the leader of the Branch Davidian cult, David Koresh. In the end, agents in armored vehicles tried to fill the compound with tear gas; the buildings caught fire—it was never clear how the fires started—and most of the Davidians who remained in the compound died in the blaze. There were 75 fatalities, including about two dozen children. The Waco siege was a key flashpoint for the far right in the 1990s.

Jones saw inspiration in Cooper’s model, and Cooper became something of a mentor to the budding radio host, calling in for an interview on Jones’ early shows. Jones’ show on KJFK-FM lasted until 1999—he was even voted “Best of Austin” radio host by a local newspaper, which called him “either Austin’s great exposer of truth or a black helicopter conspiracy nut, depending on your worldview.” But his conspiracism made getting sponsors difficult, and KJFK fired him in December 1999. Jones quickly latched on to a new venture on the expanding internet: Infowars.com.

On September 11, 2001, Cooper was outraged by the attacks and warned of what would come next. “Folks, I can assure you that 72 hours from now, we will be at war. We will be bombing two or maybe three countries … Because that’s how it works. When governments are attacked, they lash out. Thousands of people who had nothing whatsoever to do with what is happening at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon are going to die,” Cooper said. “Nothing will be the same after today.”

Broadcasting that day on Infowars and about 100 syndicated stations, Jones did one better: “I went on the air and said, ‘Those were controlled demolitions,’” he later told Rolling Stone.

In the weeks ahead, Cooper and Jones diverged politically. Cooper had come to see Jones as a copycat, a fearmonger, and a liar. (On September 26, 2001, Cooper’s show was titled simply “Alex Jones—Liar.”)

Amid the aftermath of the September 11 attacks, Jones dove deeper into budding 9/11 conspiracies, and Cooper—who had stopped paying taxes, was drinking heavily, and was engaged in sometimes violent disputes with his neighbors—began prophesying his own death. In November 2001, law enforcement arrived at his Arizona compound to arrest him on an outstanding warrant on suspicion of aggravated assault; Cooper opened fire, shooting one deputy in the head, and was killed in the returning police gunfire.

The field was clear for the rise of Alex Jones.

In the years that followed, Alex Jones became a key force in the spread of 9/11 conspiracies. The movement, which came to be known as “9/11 Truth,” encompassed a host of different theories: that United Airlines Flight 93 had been downed by US fighters; that the Pentagon had been struck by a missile, not a plane; that the World Trade Centers had been brought down by space weapons.

By even the first years after 9/11, the ideas had become so widespread that the government’s 9/11 Commission took pains to document in careful factual detail the impossibility of some of the conspiracies, hoping to avoid the ambiguities that dogged the Warren Commission’s report into the JFK assassination. Popular Mechanics devoted a special issue—later turned into a book, with a foreword by Senator John McCain—to debunking the most popular ones.

But the conspiracies took root in the early internet of the 2000s: Arguably the first viral online documentary, known as Loose Change, took the conspiracies to the broader public, becoming one of the most-watched videos on Google Video and the early era of YouTube. (Jones would even get an “executive producer” credit on one version of the film.) The DVD box promised, “What you will see inside will prove without a shadow of a doubt that everything you know about 9/11 is a complete fabrication.”

The reality is that the film offered no conclusive evidence of government involvement or conspiracy, but would be familiar format-wise to anyone online today in its “We’re-just-asking-questions” tone, cherry-picking quotes and evidence out of context to broadly hand-wave at surely sinister machinations behind the scenes.

9/11 conspiracism found a home politically on both the right, with Jones and his acolytes, and the left in the 2000s, as Democrats protested the documentable lies and mistruths that helped lead the nation into war with Iraq. Documentarian Michael Moore released a blockbuster movie in 2004, Fahrenheit 9/11, a polemic that tied George W. Bush’s administration, Saudi Arabia, and Iraq together in a sinister warmongering and corporate profiteering conspiracy; it became one of the highest-grossing documentaries of all time and won the prestigious Palme d’Or at Cannes.

According to a May 2006 Zogby poll, some 42 percent of Americans believed that the US government and the 9/11 Commission “concealed or refused to investigate critical evidence that contradicts their official explanation of the September 11 attacks” and that “there has been a cover-up.”

I’ve spent much of the past decade writing about 9/11 and have spoken at hundreds of public events; rarely do I make it through an event without an audience question that’s at least conspiracy-adjacent.

Jones, in particular, found conspiracism wildly profitable. As Nicole Hemmer, a Vanderbilt professor who studies the far right, told me, “Because he was a critic of the war in Iraq, he becomes seen by many people outside of the Alex Jones universe as somebody who bridges the left-right divide. Even though he is a far-right figure, he can feast off this credibility that he has as being somebody who is above politics—and that really helps elevate him into, increasingly, a household name.”

Jones became nationally infamous for arguing that later tragedies, like the elementary school shooting at Sandy Hook, were also false-flag operations. In the first Trump term, amid the Covid-19 pandemic, Jones became a fierce voice against government lockdowns, and as the aftermath of the fall 2020 election unfolded, he and his “InfoWars Battle Tank”—an armored truck worth some $300,000—became a ubiquitous presence at Stop the Steal rallies leading up to the protests at the Capitol on January 6. Throughout Donald Trump’s rise and first term, conspiracies loomed large. Trump himself first came to political prominence amid the birtherism movement, and his supporters embraced Pizzagate and the broader QAnon conspiracy.

In recent years, Jones, of course, has suffered a remarkable comedown; his vicious lies finally caught up with him in lawsuits from the families of the victims of the Sandy Hook shooting, and after a lengthy court battle, his InfoWars.com domain has been acquired by The Onion.

But if Jones has lost his most recent battles, it’s hard not to see that his conspiracism has won the broader war. Today, as the nation marks the 25th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, it’s notable that the anti-government conspiracists have effectively taken over the US government itself—from Health and Human Services secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s Covid and vaccine denialism to President Donald Trump’s own fetid swamp of a social media feed. In news that would make Bill Cooper particularly proud, Trump has even promised to release the government’s files on the truth about UFOs. For the most part, though, we’re still waiting.

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