The Skeptics Society & Skeptic magazine

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How Skeptics Confronted 9/11 Denialism

by John Ray

Skeptics today bemoan the overwhelming proportion of people who claim to believe in all manner of conspiracy theories from the JFK assassination to the origins of HIV-AIDS. For that reason, it may be worthwhile to take a moment to stop and celebrate one area in which skeptical advocacy has been overwhelming successful: the world of 9/11 conspiracies. Through the work of scholars like Michael Shermer and James Meigs, along with everyday skeptics on the grassroots level, critical inquiry has been overwhelmingly successful in calling these conspiracy theorists to task.

A tragedy on a scale at least comparable to Pearl Harbor or the Kennedy assassination was bound to inspire a conspiracy subculture, but the takeoff success of the viral Internet documentary Loose Change and the movement it created was unprecedented. Looking out on the world in 2005 when Change became one of the most-watched Internet videos of all time, with over ten million unique viewers¹, it was hard to anticipate a future that was anything but bleak for those who felt it was their duty to defend history from such pseudohistorians.

Yet, in just under four years, the 9/11 “truth movement” has ground to a halt. Apart from the fundamental incoherence of their theories, the downfall of the 9/11 denier juggernaut was good old-fashioned skepticism at its finest, the kind that conjures visions of James Randi challenging psychics and faith healers on their home turfs and winning. Skeptics are better at their jobs than they think, and its important to give credit where credit is due.

Staking their fortunes almost solely on Internet-based content may have been the 9/11 deniers’ biggest mistake. What seems like a perfect place for pseudoscience — the Internet is un-edited, without fact-checkers or minimum publishing standards of any kind — also became a perfect place for a rapid-response system of blogs and forums to fight back. Drawing on the freely available technical information from the NIST, FEMA, and academic journals which most colleges let their students access for free, skeptical sites like ScrewLooseChange.blogspot.com and debunking911.com are able to defuse 9/11 denier claims as they arise.

The Internet forced many “ground-level” 9/11 deniers — those who spread the gospel on popular social networking sites like Facebook and in their own blogosphere — into a rhetorical corner.

Instantaneous information traps old, well-discussed claims into sheer redundancy. In three years of debating 9/11 deniers, I have encountered almost the exact same laundry list of claims on dozens of occasions. The same resources have been successful in debunking 9/11 myths since their inception, tipping the debate against them. The first Loose Change was a sweeping work that, by this author’s estimation², implicated roughly 578,000 people in their version of 9/11; the “final edition,” though twice as long, has orders of magnitude less content and almost zero positive claims, drumming up a meager 8,200 suspects³. This is almost certainly a result of Internet-based skeptics bombarding Loose Change’s makers with the facts.

What should go down as a knockout blow to the 9/11 denier movement, what Michael Shermer called “just about one of the best things ever done in the history of skepticism,”⁴ is the now-famous Popular Mechanics article turned into a best-selling book that debunked many of the top points the conspiracy theorists relied on. Joining a chorus of mainstream publications including Skeptic and taking the central claims head on, the Popular Mechanics article became a cornerstone for the 9/11 denier movement’s undoing.

The spike in 2006, prompted by the live debate between the editors of Popular Mechanics and the producers of the documentary Loose Change, shows that not only was the skeptical perspective more well-accepted than the conspiracy perspective, it began to dictate the conversation. (Graph produced using Google Trends by the author.)

The Popular Mechanics article was published in its March 2005 issue and became an Internet hit after the live debate hosted by Democracy Now! between Popular Mechanics editors Jim Meigs and David Dunbar and Loose Change creators Dylan Avery and Jason Bermas. In the aftermath of that debate — if this is any indicator of which side presented the better case — that article became the most popularly searched item pertaining to 9/11 conspiracies and, from that point on, the skeptical perspective became the dominant voice pertaining to the movement. The conversation was brought to the mainstream, and the mainstream made its decision.

Today, the 9/11 conspiracy movement is a shell of what it once was. The website masquerading as an academic journal, Journal of 9/11 Studies, has dropped from a high of six or seven articles published per issue to one, and its February 2008 edition (it’s supposed to be updated monthly) was simply skipped over, evidently for lack of a single article. The introduction to the main hub of 9/11 denier activity, 911truth.org, welcomes its visitors with a plea that announces, “we’ve cut to the bare bones, but are still far short of our basic budget needs.” Prominent “truthers” like Mark Dice, Dylan Avery, Jimmy Walter (lambasted in Penn & Teller’s Showtime series Bullshit! episode on 9/11), and Kevin Ryan have dropped into obscurity. The well read author David Ray Griffin continues to lecture, but to shrunken audiences, and this year’s big 9/11 rally looks to be set in Ottawa, not New York City — evidently due to lack of interest.

The number of articles on the popular conspiracy site “Journal of 9/11 Studies” has rapidly dwindled since a peak last year. (Graph produced using Microsoft Excel by the author.)

It is rare when those of us in the skeptical community get to celebrate a concrete success in building public consensus on an issue of pseudoscience. In the combination of grassroots Internet support and mainstream media advocacy we have seen one such moment. It was once feared that the 9/11 conspiracies would be the next JFK conspiracies — silly yet pernicious, running unchecked until it was too late. The opposite has happened here. Because the skeptical community gave the public some well-needed straight talk on the issue, pulled no punches, and let no challenge go soundly unanswered, we have won in six years what could have become a half-century long, uphill battle as with JFK conspiracy theories. Here’s to winning once in awhile.

References

1. Sales, N. “Click Here for Conspiracy.” Vanity Fair, August, 2006, www.vanityfair.com/ontheweb/features/2006/08/loosechange200608
2. Ray, J. “Total Personnel Required for ‘Loose Change’ Version of 9/11: 578,212,” www.facebook.com/photo.php?pid=34802512&op=1&o=all&view=all&subj=2211830485&aid=-1&oid=2211830485&id=5523995 . Original content created by author of this article based on information presented in “Loose Change: Final Cut.”
3. Ray, J. “8,157 High-Ranking American, British, and Pakistani Officials are Out to Get You!” http://conspiraciesrnotus.blogspot.com/2007/12/8157-high-ranking-american-british-and.html . Original content created by author of this article based on information presented in “Loose Change: Final Cut.”
4. “9/11 Conspiracies: Fact or Fiction.” Narr. Lester Holt. Documentary. The History Channel. 20 Aug. 2007.