September 11th and conspiracy myths: doubts, whispers, subversion

The final hearing in the matter is scheduled for October 14th. The UK Supreme Court's website says of the hearing: "The plaintiff believes that the collapse of the World Trade Center was caused by the detonation of previously planted explosives."

The plaintiff is Matt Campbell, 57, a reflexology therapist from the county of Sussex in the south of England and brother of Geoff Campbell. He once worked in New York for the Reuters news agency. On September 11, 2001, he sat in the World Trade Center at a conference of the venture investment firm Risk Waters Group. Nine months later, investigators used DNA analysis to match the remains of a collarbone found in the rubble to Geoff Campbell.

“I don’t believe the official story,” says Matt Campbell today. The London police “copy-pasted the US authorities’ account” of the cause of his brother’s death, Campbell said. He is demanding a new investigation – and has therefore sued. Campbell collected 2,500 pages of documents. He calls them “evidence”.

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His lawyers had until September 1st to file their brief. One day before the deadline expires, Campbell sits in his apartment and explains what it says in the Zoom call. Or rather, he starts with it.

For example, the US authorities have not yet fully released the files. “If what they say is true, why are these files kept under lock and key?”

Or that the US agency National Institute of Standards and Technology, which was responsible for investigating the cause of the collapse on 9/11, had not even examined the rubble for explosive residue.

And didn't the British authorities also cover up and manipulate the media the circumstances of the 1972 massacre by British paratroopers in Northern Ireland known as "Bloody Sunday" and the disaster at Sheffield's Hillsborough Stadium in which 96 football fans died in April 1989?

After his brother's remains were brought to Great Britain, there was an official investigation into the cause of death in January 2013. An investigator has been interviewed about the death of his brother and nine other British 9/11 victims. After 100 minutes, the West London Coroner's Court made an official finding: Campbell's brother was "in the North Tower when American Airlines Flight 11 was deliberately piloted into the building, causing it to collapse at 10.28am."

Campbell calls the investigation “completely inadequate.” He has read over 160 books on 9/11, raised over half a million pounds for trials, and followed the preliminary trial of the main suspect, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, in Guantánamo. The British Attorney-General's Office has rejected Campbell's request for a new investigation into the cause of death, and the High Court has rejected an appeal against it. The “Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth,” however, supported him, Pink Floyd singer Roger Waters gave him a “significant” donation for legal fees, and the International Center for 9/11 Justice is collecting money for his lawsuit. Now Campbell hopes to go to the Supreme Court. “I am convinced that we have good arguments and can win there,” he says.

September 11th "seemed to confirm for many people pre-existing beliefs that things are not as they seem and have continued to fuel them to this day," says anthropologist Susannah Crockford, who teaches at the University of Exeter.

These beliefs go back a long way into human history. But the period around 2001 took it to a new technological level. The Internet gave Google to the doubters. It democratized “own research” and made it easier than ever before. Forums offered unprecedented opportunities for viral exchange. The 9/11 amateur documentary “Loose Change,” which was released in 2005, is said to have been viewed over 100 million times to date.

“Alternative expertise” became popular. “Those who doubt do not test themselves at what temperature structural steel melts,” says Crockford. Your “own research” is often a web search for representations from alternative experts. “They usually have some form of degree that seems to give them competence,” says Crockford. But they move outside the procedures and hierarchies of universities or traditional media. Instead, the Internet allows them to “give people exactly the stories they want to hear,” Crockford says.

Because conspiracy theories offer, as has been extensively researched, a reduction in complexity, order, meaning and a sense of belonging. They make complicated things seem less threatening. The more people lose trust in the institutions, the easier it is for them to find explanations for their supposed failure in conspiracy stories. Anyone who serves these needs can become extremely popular.

The taz history offers a prominent example. Its co-founder Mathias Bröckers wrote a “conspiratorial diary” about 9/11 on the Telepolis portal that was viewed millions of times. His resulting books were bombshells. Bröckers didn't travel to the USA to do research, but rather googled it. The label “conspiracy theorist” was an instrument to protect “official narratives” against critical questions, said Bröckers at the time. In 2002, in the taz, he was allowed to call the official depiction of 9/11 “grotesque” and “laughable” and whispered that no further investigation was being carried out “because his own people were behind it everywhere.” It was only in 2011, in the third taz interview with him on the topic, that he was approached more critically.

Two phenomena that significantly shape today's political structure are each related in their own way to the 9/11 conspiracy belief: populism and cross-front.

The Tübingen American scholar Michael Butter points out that, with the exception of a few JFK exposé books, conspiracy beliefs were only at home in “hermetic subcultures” for a long time. The Internet popularized them. Conspiracy believers “were able to easily circumvent the media’s ‘gatekeeper function’” and create counterpublics, Butter said. The 9/11 theories were initially dismissed by the US political establishment as “outrageous” and “evil”. But the 9/11 “Truther” movement had created a resonance space of doubt and mistrust.

From 2004 onwards, the lie circulated there that Barack Obama was a Muslim, and in 2008 it was said that he was not born in the USA. In 2009, the first Republican members of Congress took up this issue. With the “Birthers” attacks on Obama, the partly libertarian “Tea Party” movement also grew and radicalized the Republicans. “For the Trump campaign, conspiracy-minded rhetoric increasingly became part of the overarching populist narrative of the exploitation of the ‘people’ by the political and economic ‘elite’ in 2015/16,” writes Butter. This populism and its “conspiratorial murmurs” provided Trump’s base with “a convincing answer to their loss of status, why they could no longer fulfill the role of provider and protector that was central to their image of masculinity,” Butter continued.

So the elites were to blame. While conspirators were previously suspected of planning a takeover of power, today - even after 9/11 - the powerful themselves, politicians, business leaders and the media are believed to be the conspirators.

This leads to the absurd situation in which many Republican candidates in the USA, for example, present themselves to this day in an act of fundamental self-denial against the “Washington establishment”, i.e. against “career politicians”, lobbyists, bureaucracy, elites, media – in short: the “Deep State”.

Trump pushed this distrust of “Washington” further and further, especially with the lie of the stolen 2020 election, which up to 70 percent of Republican supporters still believe today.

His murmurs are linked to libertarian ideas that are widespread in right-wing circles: the state cannot be trusted, taxes are rejected, and the individual should be given maximum freedom.

This skepticism about the state is the point of contact with part of the left. They traditionally look critically at the imperialist US foreign policy and the internal and external armament, which was once primarily motivated by anti-communist sentiments. Some viewed 9/11 as a pretext or even staged in favor of the Bush administration's new world order wars. Accordingly, they had deep mistrust of the neocon think tank “Project for the New American Century,” which in 2000 called for an expansion of US military power and considered “a catastrophic and catalyzing event – ​​like a new Pearl Harbor” necessary.

The US attacks on Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003 were initially rejected primarily by leftists. Later, opposition to such wars also became constitutive for the populist, libertarian, extreme US right.

In 2014, the “Vigils for Peace” took place in Germany. The researcher Michael Butter calls it the “decisive event” for the conspiracy ideology scene in this country. Under figures like the ex-radio presenter Ken Jebsen – who worked closely with the ex-tazler Mathias Bröckers and considers 9/11 to be an “inside job” – they agitated against NATO, the USA, secret services, armaments, German foreign policy and mainstream media. The political scientist Armin Pfahl-Traughber calls the vigils the “first significant case” of a cross-front between left and right extremists and Reich citizens.

In 2012, Ken Jebsen spoke of a “media weapon of mass destruction”. Accordingly, the “do your own research” idea was also popular in the vigil scene.

During the corona pandemic, it boomed. The “lateral thinkers” emerged and did their best to research what alternative experts such as Sinsheim ENT doctor Bodo Schiffmann said about the pandemic. “Self-thinkers” is what they wanted to be called by the mainstream media. They also claimed to overcome the opposition between left and right. The ability to set up channels on unregulated messenger services such as Telegram further simplified networking and exchange during this time.

The pandemic appeared to many to be an event of apocalyptic dimensions. The theories about the alleged “plandemic”, whose supporters were able to differentiate themselves from the “sleeping sheep”, were all the more relieving for many people. An “apocalyptic element”, the idea of ​​a final battle between good and evil, often resonates in conspiracy theories, says Australian historian Andrew McKenzie-McHarg. After September 11th, a photo of the smoke from one of the towers that was hit went viral and was passed around online as either the face of “Satan” or bin Laden.

The idea of ​​a final battle has also become perpetuated in populist rhetoric today. It accuses the “elites” of bringing about the downfall. In this respect, the style with which cross-front circles are now warning about the “Third World War” provoked by the West is similar to the highly urgent final battle rhetoric of Maga or the AfD. This is where the strategic nature of conspiracy-minded state skepticism becomes apparent: Once the state has been wrested away from the corrupt elites, the new leaders are suddenly entitled to unrestricted, supra-legal harshness in order to drive out evil.

One of the most important evils warned against in this world today is the “Great Exchange” - the claim that the elite is driving unbridled mass migration in order to be able to better control and disenfranchise the newly formed people. No conspiracy theory is more widespread in populist circles today.

Overall, according to researcher Michael Butter, there is the impression in Germany that conspiracy theories are becoming more and more influential and therefore more dangerous. In fact, belief in conspiracy theories has not increased in Germany in recent years.

But he remains at a high level. According to the Mitte study by the Friedrich Ebert Foundation from 2018/19 - i.e. before the pandemic - around 34 percent of those surveyed somewhat or completely agreed with the statement that “politicians and other leaders are just puppets of the powers behind them.” In 2025 it was 33 percent.

There is no longer any trace of “hermetic subcultures”. The spaces of doubt are wide today.