Prior to the events of 9/11, Jones had mostly been following in the footsteps of the Patriot movement’s leading conspiracy-meisters, mimicking and amplifying what had become, for a small but growing national audience, the many theories that made up their alternative universe in the 1990s. That changed the day of the attacks.
Jones gave his audience what they later came to see as a prediction of the 9/11 attacks in his broadcast of July 25, 2001, while ranting about the Oklahoma City bombing and other false flag operations he claimed were perpetrated by the New World Order. He thought recent talk about Middle Eastern terrorists was a prelude to more of the same. “Call the White House and tell them we know the government is planning terrorism,” he said. “Bin Laden is the boogeyman they need in this Orwellian phony system.”
So in a sense Jones was thoroughly prepared six weeks later on the morning of September 11, when New York City’s Twin Towers and the Pentagon in Washington were hit by jet airliners flown by Al Qaeda terrorists. He opened his show by declaring that what Americans were seeing on their televisions was a staged terror attack. “I’ll tell you the bottom line,” Jones said. “Ninety-eight percent chance this was a government-orchestrated controlled bombing.”
Years later, Jones told Rolling Stone’s Alexander Zaitchik, “I went on the air and said, ‘Those were controlled demolitions. You just watched the government blow up the World Trade Center.’ I lost 70 percent of my affiliates that day. Station managers asked me, ‘Do you want to be on this crusade going nowhere, or do you want to be a star?’ I’m proud I never compromised.” It wasn’t in Jones’s nature to change his tune—he had been building toward this for years, and he finally had a national event around which he could spin a conspiracy-theory empire all his own.
That’s what he set about doing in the subsequent weeks and years, gradually building a nationwide audience for his now-independent Infowars website, one conspiracy theory at a time: The Towers were felled not by the airliners but by powerful explosives already in place when the attacks began. Military jets had been intentionally grounded to prevent them from intercepting the airliners. The Pentagon was hit not by a jet airliner crashing into it, but by a series of explosives designed to resemble a jet crash. Soon branches off the central theories began sprouting like kudzu.
The believers insisted that what they were seeking was the truth about the attacks, so it became known as the 9/11 Truth movement, or Truthers for short. And not all of them were right-wing Patriots like Jones. The conspiracist Patriot universe had always attracted an element of the fringe left, such as people who promoted theories about health cures and the claim that the FDA was hiding cancer cures, or claims about jet contrails secretly poisoning the public.
This element, and other conspiracists from across the political bandwidth, formed a major part of the early audience for the theories. After all, a major element of the 9/11 Truther theories was their inherent critique of the Republican Bush administration, and most of them were already inclined to distrust the conservative government’s policies. The 9/11 theories gave them further ammunition. Other prominent 9/11 theorists included the French analyst Thierry Meyssan, who wrote a book, 9/11: The Big Lie, in which he hypothesized that the attacks had been staged by a faction of the US military intelligence complex in order to impose a military regime, and a former theology professor, David Ray Griffin, who published a series of books supposedly exposing the conspiracy. These commentators distanced themselves from Jones and his conspiracy mill, whose videos and website rants spread everywhere on social media and Internet chat forums.
In addition to his daily radio show, Jones began churning out what he called documentary films that explored the various conspiracies around 9/11, and selling the videotapes and DVD versions on his Infowars website. They bore titles such as 9/11: The Road to Tyranny; The Masters of Terror: Exposed; Matrix of Evil; Martial Law 9/11: Rise of the Police State; and Terrorstorm: The History of Government-Sponsored Terrorism. Jones later claimed that this last film provided some of the key footage for the conspiracist documentary series Zeitgeist, which similarly explored 9/11 conspiracies with a somewhat artier tone. There were all kind of similar spin-offs and independent 9/11 ventures, including Loose Change, for which Jones served as executive producer.
Conspiracy theories had always been something of a dividing line between Patriot extremists and mainstream conservatives, and that line became sharper now. Figures such as Rush Limbaugh and Fox News’s Bill O’Reilly became more pointed in distancing themselves from Jones and the 9/11 conspiracy theories, especially because so many of them were staunch defenders of the Bush administration. The notion that Bush might have been part of a New World Order plot to bring down the Towers was not just risible to them but bordered on treason.
Limbaugh in particular was scathing in his dismissal of the 9/11 theorists, labeling them “loons” and similar epithets. He once pulled the plug on a call-in listener for suggesting that Limbaugh look at the evidence that the attacks were an “inside job” by the government. Limbaugh went into a rant about “kookery”:
We don’t allow kooks. Kookery is never allowed here. And if you’re gonna talk about 9/11 being an inside job, and Khalid Sheik Mohamed, and you’re going to start agreeing with Rosie O’Donnell, I would suggest rehab and treatment, counseling and so forth. You know, like Rosie, … you’ve probably got really deep issues from your childhood that needs to be resolved, because you, sir, are a glittering jewel of colossal ignorance, and I am simply intolerant of it.
At Fox News, the right-leaning cable news network that had grown to become the dominant voice and propaganda organ of the conservative movement during the Bush years, there was, similarly, little tolerance for 9/11 conspiracism, although one correspondent, Geraldo Rivera, and an on-air contributor, Andrew Napolitano, both had brief flirtations with “being open” to some of the theories. But most of its talking heads, particularly talk-show hosts Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity, treated any hint of 9/11 conspiracism as evidence of the speaker’s vile character.
The radio pundit Michael Reagan, the son of Ronald Reagan, made the mainstream-conservative loathing for the Truthers explicit in one of his broadcasts:
There is a group that’s sending letters to our troops in Iraq … claiming 9/11 was an inside job—oh, yeah, yeah—and that they should rethink why they’re fighting … Excuse me, folks, I’m going to say this: … Just find the people who are sending those letters to our troops to demoralize our troops and … you take them out, they are traitors to our country, and shoot them. You have a problem with that, deal with it. But anyone who would do that doesn’t deserve to live. You shoot them. You call them traitors … and you shoot them dead. I’ll pay for the bullet.
This became something of a recurring theme—though for the most part, it was not directed at right-wing “kooks,” but mainstream liberals.
Eliminationist rhetoric had become popular with right-wing talk-show hosts in the 1990s, during the heyday of the militia movement from which so much of it originated, brewed up amid the virulent hatred of the government that both had reveled in. Even back then Rush Limbaugh liked to make little “jokes”: “I tell people don’t kill all the liberals. Leave enough so we can have two on every campus—living fossils—so we will never forget what these people stood for.”
So even though the events of 9/11 had created a wedge between the conspiracist Patriot universe and the extreme pro-Bush war patriotism of mainstream conservatives, the anger and viciousness remained intact on both sides. It expressed itself in the crude demonization of a targeted Other as vermin and excrement and disease fit only for elimination, ultimately creating tacit permission for people to excise them, violently or by any other means, in the name of “protecting society.”
Mainstream conservatives became especially hyperpatriotic in their defense of the Bush administration and its decisions to invade, first Afghanistan in October 2001 in the wake of the 9/11 attacks and then, more controversially, Iraq in March 2003, to overthrow the regime of the dictator Saddam Hussein. Critics of the war were early on dismissed as traitors who, in Fox News host Bill O’Reilly’s favorite phrase of the time, “hated this country.”
In one of his nightly Fox broadcasts