A Folklorist Looks at 9/11 ‘Conspiracy Theories” 

By Dr. Kevin Barrett 

[a nearly verbatim text of the lecture delivered at the University of Wisconsin-Madison on October 1^st, 2006, as part one of a two-part event “9/11: Fact and Folklore.” This served as an introduction Dr. James Fetzer’s lecture “9/11: What We Know Now That We Didn’t Know Then”; this version includes footnotes] 

When people hear about a lecture about “Fact and Folklore” they may expect a garden-variety debunking. That is understandable. Words used for folk narrative—folklore, folktale, myth, legend, tale, and so on—are popularly used as synonyms for “false information.” And facts, of course, are not just true—they are inarguable. “You can’t argue with the facts!”                                                                     

So a few of you—very few, I imagine—may have come here today expecting to hear some dee-ing of bunk. You may have come here expecting to hear that the folklore will consist of “crazy conspiracy theories” like “Bush and Cheney hired the alien reptiles to do it—and Elvis was involved!” And the facts would then be “debunkings” presented by a representative of some august and venerable institution as the Rand Corporation, NIST, the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks, or Popular Mechanics magazine. “Wait—Popular Mechanics! Aren’t they secretly controlled by the Rosicrucians? Haven’t you noticed, there’s always this funny little ad for the Rosicrucians in the back!” 

In fact, folklorists do not define their field of study in opposition to fact. On the contrary, Folklore is a fact-oriented discipline. Folklorists, like many others in the human sciences, are interested in particular kinds of social facts—concrete, specific, documented, verifiable instances of human communication and behavior. I will argue that the kinds of social facts that folklorists are interested in, and the disciplinary tools they have developed to collect and analyze such facts, are highly relevant to vitally important contemporary debates about 9/11.   

While folklore may be fact-oriented—much Folklore training involves learning how to identify, collect and preserve social facts—it also considers the aesthetics and other values that are inextricably bound up in social facts. In particular, Folklorists focus their attention on informal, colloquial, non-institutional behaviors that others often ignore as trivial. For example, while literature scholars often focus on such formalized institutional phenomena as “Shakespeare studies” a folklorist might study jokes and stories told in taverns—the stuff Shakespeare stole. Folklorists take the groundlings seriously, not just as minor characters in someone else’s play, but as creative, autonomous authors of their own lives. The folklorist is also interested in what the actors, producers and directors say to each other backstage, on coffee breaks, and in taverns.  

To sum it up: The informal, non-institutional side of expressive culture is what most interests the folklorist. And nowhere is there a more significant gap between official and unofficial discourse than in contemporary debates over the facts and meaning of 9/11. As the editor of a mainstream newspaper once told me, “Get a few drinks in people and they’ll start talking about ‘what might have really happened on 9/11.’” But those same people won’t speak that way, for the record, in broad daylight. As a Muslim, I really shouldn’t be saying this...but maybe what this country needs is a couple of stiff drinks! 

After a few stiff drinks, maybe this country will be able to have a rational conversation about so-called 9/11 conspiracy theories. From the folklorist’s perspective, it is no surprise to see people questioning the official version of history, or spreading “news” that established news organizations ignore or attack. Often the people seem to be wrong. Reports of Elvis sightings, like many paranormal and UFO reports, are more interesting for what they tell us about culture than for their empirical truth claims. Other times the people may be right. Folkloric reports of stones falling from the sky were dismissed as the superstitious ravings of peasants prior to the discovery of meteorites.[1] More recently tales of evil spirit attacks in the night have been shown to have an empirical basis in sleep paralysis,[2] while folk reports about ESP are being at least partially borne out by meta-statistical analysis of many decades of increasingly rigorous studies.[3] More recently, unofficial accounts of Pearl Harbor,[4] the JFK assassination,[5] and the Gulf of Tonkin incident[6] have developed support among historians. Indeed, many of the craziest, most paranoid-sounding “conspiracy theories” have been surpassed by factual accounts of the CIA mind-control project MK-Ultra,[7] the 9/11-esque Operation Northwoods,[8] CIA involvement in drug trafficking,[9] lethal biological warfare tests on American cities,[10] the Tuskogee syphilis study,[11] and other outlandish abuses of power. 

Official discourse on 9/11 takes the form of what folklorists, whatever their political persuasion, readily recognize as a myth.[12] Myths are sacred narratives—awe-inspiring stories that are held to be true and unquestionable by their users. Myths typically separate time into a “before” and an “after,” and provide a shared understanding for the contemporary “whole new world” that came “after” the mythic event. Questioning a myth is widely regarded as heresy. That the study of myths is relevant to 9/11 is made clear by the fact that the Bush Administration team member chosen to be the main author of the 9/11 Commission Report, Dr. Philip Zelikow, is an expert in “the construction and maintenance of ‘public myths’” such as the standard account of Pearl Harbor. He is also the co-author of a 1999 Foreign Affairs article on the way American culture would be changed by a devastating terrorist event.[13] I have analyzed 9/11 as myth in “The Myth of 9/11” to be published in 9/11 and the American Empire: Christians, Jews and Muslims Speak Out, which can now be purchased on Amazon and will be shipping in about two weeks.[14] 

Clearly the official account of 9/11 is a sacred myth for many Americans, regardless of whether that myth was a scripted “new Pearl Harbor” or a spontaneous reaction to unforeseen events.[15] But more and more Americans are seeing the official account as a legend—a narrative that is told as true, but at whose core is a debate on belief.[16] From the standpoint of folkloristics, it is interesting how the myth is energetically  promulgated, and heretics castigated, in official institutions—while the folk are increasingly viewing it as a legend, if not a lie.[17]

Paul Craig Roberts, a key member of the Reagan Administration brain trust, who is listed by Who’s Who as one of the 100 most influential political thinkers in America, put it well: “"I guess the real story about 9/11 is about what the people are actually saying.”[18] That “the people” include a great many former military and intelligence officials,[19] and that Roberts agrees with “the people,” that the official story of the destruction of the World Trade Center makes no sense, is not the point. From a folklorist’s perspective, what is so fascinating is that so many of “the people”—roughly 36% according to a recent Scripps-Howard poll[20]—have created for themselves a shared interpretation of social and political reality that is so radically at variance with the perspective of the dominant corporate, governmental and (dare I say) academic institutions. We are experiencing an unprecedented crisis of institutional authority. To some, the solution is obvious: “What!? No faith in our institutions? These people need to be institutionalized!” That’s how the old Soviet Union dealt with people who see social reality through a non-institutional perspective. Others, only slightly less harsh in their judgments, say “What, no faith in the institutional version of social reality? Fire them from their jobs in our institutions!” This is the judgment of apparatchiks like Steve Nass and the Commissars of Brigham Young University, as well as the Lynne Cheney-and-Joe Lieberman-founded Stalinist-purge-urging front group, the American Council of Trustees and Alumni.[21]

Instead of all this panic, censorship and repression, I suggest that our academic institutions ought to confront this crisis of institutional authority head-on—by studying it and thinking about it. Many of the disciplines represented at this great University, whose task is “fearless sifting and winnowing” and whose motto is “the truth will set you free” are well-situated to study the public crisis of confidence that has developed around the facts and meaning of 9/11. Obviously structural engineers, physicists, aeronautical engineers, chemists, and materials scientists, as well as historians and social scientists who specialize in geopolitics, covert operations, the proximate and underlying causes of war—and let’s not forget philosophers of science—will have specialized roles to play in contributing to the conversation about whether and to what extent this crisis of confidence is warranted. Less obviously, but perhaps more importantly, all of us who have been trained in critical thinking need to read the 9/11 Commission Report alongside the arguments and evidence offered by its critics, and decide whether the Report is an adequate official account of the most important historical event of the 21^st century.[22]

Folklorists have several interesting roles to play. They might begin by noticing that the folk discourse of the 9/11 skeptics is a remarkable social fact, and studying it intensively. The 9/11 truth movement is exactly the kind of folk group that folklorists love to study—a high-context folk group.[23] Such groups share a strong sense of identity, in-group solidarity, strong codes of conduct, particular cultural practices, and culture-specific information. Typical examples include dangerous professions including the military, loggers and miners, firefighters, police, as well as those ethnic and religious groups that carry a strong sense of group identity and pervasively influence beliefs and behavior.  

9/11 truth movement members (TMMs) typically go through a difficult period of self-initiation when they adopt the belief that 9/11 was an inside job.[24] Group members sometimes swap stories about how they made this discovery and how it changed their lives, just as Marines might tell stories about how they joined the corps, immigrants how they came to America, or religious people about how they assumed a particular religious identity. This intense group identity stems in part from the perception of a tremendous difference in worldviews between group members and outsiders. Outsiders—those who see no problem with the official version of 9/11—are regarded ambivalently. TMMs sometimes view outsiders as “sheeple.” The perceived gullibility, passivity and stupidity of people who believe the official story is a never-ending source of amazement, horror, exasperation and anger among TMMs. This attitude presumably contains an element of projection, since most TMMs once believed the official story themselves. In contrast to this unsympathetic attitude, many TMMs are able to maintain varying degrees of sympathy for the “sheeple” and communicate sympathetically with outsiders. This is, of course, a more effective communicative approach. 

The truth movement resembles other such high-context folk groups as soldiers and firefighters in being bound together by a shared sense of danger. The perception is that a government ruthless enough to murder thousands of its own people to trigger a series of wars and fascist crackdowns would stop at nothing to prevent its false-flag attack from being exposed. TMMs worry not only about personal danger, but also about future false-flag attacks that could be used to institutionalize non-institutional thinkers. They regularly cite reports that Haliburton has been awarded hundreds of millions of dollars to build internment camps in the USA.[25] 

The difference in social worldviews between TMMs and outsiders is so extreme that it can lead to mutual accusations of insanity. Outsiders who have not studied the history of false-flag operations and war-trigger incidents may view the 9/11 truth perspective as so bizarre and improbable that it seems “crazy.”[26] And the persistence with which TMMs promote their “crazy” viewpoint strikes outsiders as obsessive. TMMs, for their part, believe that false-flag attacks and war-trigger incidents are sufficiently common that it is those who dismiss the 9/11 truth hypothesis a priori who are crazy. Likewise, they assert that many 9/11 smoking guns are of such extreme obviousness that those who fail to acknowledge them must be suffering from cognitive dissonance or worse. They argue that those who view the abundant video and photographic archive of the destruction of the three World Trade Center buildings, and see “fire-induced pancake collapses,” must be unimaginably feeble of eye, mind, or moral fiber.[27] Likewise, they claim, television news announcers who look at the tiny fraction of Pentagon impact videos that have been released, and see an American Airlines jetliner, must be experiencing powerful and frightening hallucinations, and ought to consider seeking treatment.[28] As for their apparent obsessiveness, TMMs see the 9/11 as a crime so monstrous, and of such monumental historical impact, that it justifies dropping everything else until it is resolved. 

This insider-outsider split tends to continue beyond 9/11, as TMMs are led to question other orthodoxies. They often invoke a metaphor from the film The Matrix, “take the red pill” meaning “see reality exactly the way it is”—that is, as a “matrix,” a carefully-engineered consensus hallucination. 9/11 truth is said to be the “red pill” that can strip away the veil.[29] 

In their efforts to annihilate what they see as a whole matrix of engineered hallucination, TMMs are forced to exercise great creativity, which makes their expressive cultural productions that much more interesting from a folklorist’s perspective. Consider the Deception Dollar.[30] (Deception dollars distributed to audience.) The Deception Dollar is one of the most interesting and arguably one of the most effective political pamphlets ever produced. Political pamphlets and posters have been called “instant litter,” and  there is even a book by that title collecting and reproducing them. The 9/ll Deception Dollar is rather an “instant classic” that recipients usually want to save and show their friends.  

The Deception Dollar is a clever and realistic parody of the most heavily-cathected piece of paper on the planet, the US Federal Reserve Note. Those who have “taken the red pill” believe that actual Federal Reserve Notes are just green pieces of paper, backed by nothing, produced in great abundance by a private consortium of banks controlled by a relatively small number of immensely powerful families. They believe that actual Federal Reserve Notes are in themselves worthless except for such purposes as elementary toilet functions and the lining of birdcages—tasks for which they are in fact far worse suited than the much larger pieces of worthless paper produced in even greater quantity by monopoly newspaper corporations.  But in “matrix reality”—the consensus hallucination of our psychotic society, according to those who have “taken the red pill”—these little scraps of green paper, if and only if they are produced by the Federal Reserve, are unimaginably powerful magical objects. The Matrix-dwellers, when they are handed these powerful magical green scraps of paper, are overcome with astonishment or greed or gratitude. Then they notice that the bill doesn’t look quite right. 

The Matrix-dwellers usually react with a smile or laughter. This is amazing, since 9/11 truth messages typically provoke fear, horror or revulsion in the uninitiated. What makes the Deception Dollar humorous? Folklorist Elliot Oring would say that the humor is based on a perceived incongruity between the heavily-cathected real dollar and the parody. More specifically, Oring writes:  “Jokes are forms par excellence that deal with situations of unspeakability, because they may conjoin an unspeakable, and hence incongruous, universe of discourse to a speakable one.”[31] Oring famously analyzed space shuttle disaster jokes like these: “What does NASA stand for? Need another seven astronauts. Where are the astronauts spending their next vacation? All over Florida. What color was Christa McAulif’s eyes? Blue. One blew this way, the other blew that way.”  

Oring concluded that such jokes, usually deplored as tasteless or explained away as therapeutic, are actually a way that people—the folk—talk back to the media. He writes: “Public disasters are media triumphs. They are what make the news. Indeed, our awareness of national or international disasters is dependent upon the media—particularly television news broadcasting. Furthermore, the frame for communication of information about the disaster is established by the media. In doing so, they establish canons of speakability and unspeakability (or viewability and unviewability).” Oring argues that space shuttle Challenger disaster jokes were “a rebellion against a world defined by the media. Much of the world that we have come to know and about which we worry is a media construction. Were it not for the media, our disasters would be far fewer.” [32] 

Especially our terrorist-induced disasters. Even if we assume 9/11 to be the work of foreign terrorists, and still there were no airport security whatsoever, your chances of dying in a hijacked plane would almost certainly be lower than your odds of dying in a car crash on the way to or from the airport.[33] Thus the airport security de-shoeings and purse-dumpings and fluid-confiscatings and pat-down assaults by bored, uniformed thugs that are now an accepted part of air travel have very little to do with reality. They are a response to media disaster images, not to any actual threat. 

The Deception Dollar talks back to the media and to media-constructed reality, just as Oring’s Challenger jokes challenged the media and its matrix. The Deception Dollar tells us that the media’s version of 9/11 is “false currency.” Unable to transmit this message through the media itself, the makers of the Deception Dollar have circumvented the media by creating this amazing little leaflet. Its message is not just that 9/11 was counterfeit, but that green paper depicting a dead president—or a brain-dead president—is itself of questionable value...especially in an era in which the Federal Reserve’s monopoly control of the planet’s currency seems about to implode.[34] Humor makes the message palatable, as it shreds the red-white-and-blue shroud of pious shock-and-awe that the media have draped over the whole subject of 9/11. 

Though a paper artifact, the Deception Dollar advertises websites put up by TMMs. This leads us out of the study of the Truth Movement proper, into a broader consideration of the radical change in folk communications media brought by the internet and digital video. Marshall McLuhan’s famous line “the medium is the message” could describe the way the 9/11 truth movement is an artifact of the internet, and the radically-enhanced folk-communications it has brought. Thanks to digital audiovisuals, email and the world-wide web, the folk are now a leg up on their would-be manipulators, those well-paid professionals in corporate media, public relations, marketing, and psychological warfare or psy-ops, whose collective job is to reify and manipulate their fellow human beings.[35]  

It is one thing for the content of informal, non-institutional, “folk” communication to subvert institutional authority. It is another and more significant thing for the very medium of folk communication to radically shift in a way that empowers the folk and disempowers the institutions. And that is what has happened. The world has been turned upside-down as the old oral-transmission grapevine has gone digital.  

Informal, orally-transmitted skepticism about the official version of events has always been powerful but lacking in precision. It often got the theme right but the details wrong, as Patricia Turner shows in I Heard It Through the Grapevine.[36] Turner shows that when the black community buzzed with rumors about Church’s fried chicken dispensing chemical sterilizers to African-Americans, the message of those rumors—that the white American power structure shows such a lack of consideration for the value of African-American dignity, autonomy, and life that wildly unethical “scientific” programs and experiments could be expected—is basically accurate. Exhibit A would be the infamous Tuskogee experiments, in which black Americans were meticulously observed by scientists as they slowly died of untreated syphilis.[37] 

Today’s digitally-enhanced subversives and skeptics can spread large numbers of copies of audio, video and photographic evidence, along with an unlimited amount of writing, for pennies. This digital awakening may turn out to be our second post-Gutenberg revolution in half a century. Its importance may rival the emergence of writing, which created hierarchical societies of kings, priests and scribes; with the invention of the printing press, which created the kind of mass-literate societies we call “democratic”; and with the invention of television, which McLuhan suggests created a global village of creeping Orwellian fascism.[38] 9/11, in this view, was the last gasp of television as a means of mind-control via mass hypnosis, while the 9/11 truth controversies may represent the birth pangs of the new, digitally-enhanced democracy.  

Whether this prognosis turns out to be right, or a tad over-optimistic, it is entirely appropriate that a university dedicated to fearless sifting and winnowing in pursuit of the truth that will set you free should be a place for reflection on these profoundly important social changes, beginning with the 9/11-related crisis of confidence in our institutions. And it is necessary that folklorists and others in the human sciences think about the way the many-to-many medium of digitally-enhanced folk communication is overthrowing the old one-to-many media of elite-generated social control that have dominated more and more of this planet over the past five thousand years. To study the 9/11 truth movement is to study what may turn out to be the cutting edge of the most significant social-structural change in the history of humanity. 

Then again, it may not. The debate is unresolved. Is the internet’s ability to magnify falsehood as well as truth simply confusing us with garbage in, garbage out? If the most internet-savvy people are the most likely to doubt the official 9/11 myth, is that because they’re discovering the truth—or is the internet just driving internet-savvy people crazy? To answer these questions, we will need the empirical facts about what really happened on 9/11. And it just so happens that we have with us today an expert in sussing out empirical facts. Dr. James Fetzer, a former Marine Corps officer, has a Ph.D. in the Philosophy of Science and  has published more than 25 books and countless articles. Dr. Fetzer is a Distinguished McKnight Professor Emeritus from the University of Minnesota and a co-founder of Scholars for 9/11 Truth, st911.org. It is my pleasure to welcome to the Madison area, and to this great university, an extraordinary citizen, scholar, and patriot: Dr. James Fetzer.