Type the words “9/11 conspiracy theories” into the search bar of YouTube, and you will be met with a strange and endless digital carnival. There are slickly edited videos, ominous thumbnails, and talking heads who promise to reveal what “really” happened on September 11, 2001. One popular clip, viewed more than half a million times, zooms in on the burning Twin Towers and asks: “Inside Job?” Commentators like Joe Rogan and Tucker Carlson offer their hushed, knowing takes. Others blame the CIA, the “deep state,” or the Illuminati. It is a strange thing to witness, especially when you remember that the actual event killed nearly 3,000 people and changed the world. Twenty-five years later, these theories have not faded away. If anything, they have become stronger, stranger, and more tangled with our politics. They have also moved from the fringes of society into the mainstream. Once, conspiracy theories were associated with eccentric people in tinfoil hats, typing away in their mothers’ basements. Now they are part of our shared political culture. The shift began around 2016, when Oxford Dictionaries named “post-truth” its word of the year. Since then, distrust in media and government has become a powerful force. False claims about a stolen 2020 election helped fuel the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol. And more recently, a wave of entirely unsubstantiated accusations has claimed Israel was involved in 9/11, recycling older theories while riding on the anger of the present moment, especially over the war in Gaza and the perception of Israeli influence in Washington. What was once a weird corner of the internet has become a weapon in the hands of far-right politicians, offering false explanations for real fears and exploiting grievances for political gain.
Suspicion of the state has always been part of American culture. Long before the Twin Towers fell, unanswered questions about the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963 gave birth to a sprawling collection of theories about who was really responsible. But 9/11 was different. The attacks unfolded live on television, turning an event that triggered extraordinary fear and uncertainty into a spectacle watched in real time around the world. As Hugo Drochon, an associate professor of political theory at the University of Nottingham, has pointed out, the event was captured instantaneously. People saw it on television. The United States was at the center of the world, and this was the great shock. There was also something theatrical about the horror: hijacking a plane and crashing it into the World Trade Center was an act that marked an entire generation. The attacks were followed by two wars that deepened mistrust of the U.S. government. Less than a month after 9/11, the United States invaded Afghanistan. In March 2003, a U.S.-led coalition invaded Iraq under the now-disproven claim that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. No such weapons were ever found. To many critics, this was a lie told by the government, and lies create distrust. And there is a clear correlation between distrust and belief in conspiracy theories. The past quarter-century has also seen a rapid change in how people consume information. The September 11 attacks were perhaps the first event of this scale to unfold simultaneously through 24-hour rolling television coverage and within an emerging internet culture. The early conspiracy theories emerged at the same time as cable news. With 9/11, people were watching the coverage as it happened. That created opportunities for people to pick out apparent loopholes in the evidence and debate them, especially as the internet grew. YouTube, launched just four years after the attacks, gave these theories a place to flourish. Films like “Loose Change,” which alleged that elements within the U.S. government orchestrated or “allowed” the attacks, reached enormous audiences online. False claims that the World Trade Center towers were brought down by controlled demolitions developed their own sprawling internet communities. The ground was fertile, and the seeds were planted early.
The real change, though, came when politicians began to use conspiracy theories as political weapons. Conspiracy theories have always been there, but what changed was the moment when politicians started to actively use them. That moment arrived in 2016, the year Donald Trump was campaigning for his first term in the White House. Trump had already built part of his political identity by promoting the false “birther” conspiracy theory that Barack Obama, the first Black president of the United States, was not born in America and therefore was not eligible to hold office. After becoming president, Trump repeatedly embraced or amplified other conspiracy theories. He promoted allegations of a “deep state” working against him. He amplified accounts linked to QAnon, the far-right political movement that emerged in 2017 and imagined a secret cabal of elites controlling the world. According to Drochon, Trump’s appeal to people who devoured conspiracy theories activated a new voter base, people who were traditionally less politically engaged. Certain people came out to vote who had not voted previously. Something similar happened with Brexit, the 2016 referendum in the United Kingdom that saw a narrow majority vote to leave the European Union. At the same time, social media had transformed the speed and scale at which these claims could circulate. Social media allows conspiracy theories to thrive and makes them more prominent. Linked to that, politicians seized upon them, creating a vicious circle. The theories gain greater visibility because politicians repeat them, and people then take them more seriously because they appear to explain political developments like the rise of Trump. As fake news somehow became gospel truth, Trump’s devoted MAGA base repeatedly claimed, without evidence, that widespread election fraud had cost him the 2020 presidential election. On January 6, 2021, a mob of his supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol as Congress met to certify President-elect Joe Biden’s victory. QAnon imagery and slogans were visible among the crowd. The episode showed that conspiratorial claims circulating online could be amplified by people at the highest levels of political power and fuel real-world action. As Drochon put it, conspiracy theories are a threat when the most powerful political actors adopt them.
Now, twenty-five years after 9/11, Donald Trump is once again at the center of American politics, and once again he is telling his own version of what happened in the immediate aftermath of the attacks. Speaking at a commemoration event this week, the president claimed that firefighters had carried him away from Ground Zero, where he said he had arrived with workers to assist with rescue efforts, over fears that a nearby building could collapse. “Two firemen, big strong guys – and I’m not the smallest guy in the world – they grabbed me under the arm, said: ‘Got to get out of here.’ And they literally lifted me up,” Trump claimed. It was hardly the first time he had inserted himself into the story of 9/11, or made disputed claims about the attacks. Ahead of his first presidential campaign, in November 2015, Trump claimed he had watched “thousands and thousands” of people in Jersey City cheering as the World Trade Center came down. No evidence has ever emerged to substantiate that account. In September 2019, Trump shared a video falsely claiming that U.S. Representative Ilhan Omar, a Democrat, was dancing on the anniversary of 9/11, writing: “The new face of the Democrat Party!” The footage was actually from a Congressional Black Caucus event held on a completely different day. Several people in Trump’s immediate orbit have also pushed 9/11 conspiracy theories. Republican former congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene at one time questioned whether a third 9/11 plane had ever struck the Pentagon in Alexandria, Virginia, killing nearly 200 people in addition to those who died in New York City. Greene later acknowledged she was wrong to make that claim. Laura Loomer, a far-right activist and influential Trump ally, has shared a video describing 9/11 as an “inside job.” Alex Jones, the founder of the right-wing Infowars platform, has long promoted claims that the World Trade Center was brought down through “controlled demolition.” Jones was ordered to pay millions in compensation to the families of victims of the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, which he falsely claimed was a hoax. Tucker Carlson, one of the most influential broadcasters on the American right, has also repeatedly questioned the official explanation for the collapse of the Twin Towers. These are not marginal figures. They are voices with massive audiences, and their words shape the way millions of people understand history.
In recent years, Carlson’s focus has shifted toward another strand of 9/11 conspiracy theories: claims implicating Israel. “We’ll declassify the 9/11 files. And then all those people on the internet were like, ‘Oh, the dancing Israelis. They did it. Israel had foreknowledge of 9/11.’ There were text messages sent to Israel, warning of 9/11. All true, by the way,” Carlson said in March. His argument is that Israel may have been motivated to withhold information about the attacks in order to draw the United States into conflicts in the Middle East, thus serving Israeli interests. The claims are unsupported by any credible evidence, but that has not stopped influential figures on the American right from making ample use of them. This illustrates how conspiracy theories can mutate with the politics around them. As support for Israel has fallen sharply among Americans amid the genocidal war on Gaza and the broader conflict with Iran, some political analysts have pointed to Carlson as an example of how right-wing figures have shifted with the times. After building much of his career at Fox News defending Israel, Carlson has changed direction dramatically as anger over U.S. support for Israel has grown. And with conspiracy theories already deeply embedded within large parts of the MAGA movement, Carlson has increasingly channeled genuine grievances over Gaza into unsupported claims implicating Israel in 9/11. These claims are likely to find a receptive audience among the conspiratorial elements of Trump’s base. The cycle continues: old theories are recycled, dressed in new clothing, and aimed at new enemies. What began as a fringe internet subculture has become a powerful tool for political mobilization. People are frightened, angry, and looking for someone to blame. Conspiracy theories offer simple answers to complex questions, and in a world that often feels chaotic and unfair, that is an appealing promise.
The danger is no longer theoretical. Conspiracy theories have always represented a potential threat, but at the moment that threat is particularly visible because the people promoting them are no longer simply on the fringes. Some conspiracy theorists are among the most powerful people in the world. They sit in Congress, they host popular podcasts, they run cable news shows, and one of them occupies the Oval Office. When the most powerful political actors adopt these theories, they become more than just strange beliefs. They become instruments of division, tools for undermining trust in democratic institutions, and fuel for violence. We saw this on January 6, when a mob stormed the Capitol in the name of a lie. We see it every time a new falsehood about 9/11 goes viral, every time a grieving family is forced to watch their loved one’s death become fodder for internet speculation, and every time real political grievances are twisted into fantasies about hidden cabals and secret plots. The answer is not to laugh at conspiracy theorists or dismiss them as crazy. It is to understand why people believe what they believe, to recognize the fear and distrust that lies beneath the surface, and to offer something better in its place. That means telling the truth, even when the truth is uncomfortable. It means rebuilding trust in institutions, or at least being honest about their failures. And it means remembering that real people died on September 11, 2001. They were not characters in a thriller, and their deaths were not a puzzle to be solved by internet sleuths. They were mothers and fathers, sons and daughters, friends and strangers. The conspiracy theories will probably never disappear. They have become too useful to too many people. But we can choose not to be swept along. We can choose to question the questions, to look at the evidence, and to hold on to our humanity. That is the only real defense against a world of lies.