Escaping the 9/11 Industrial Complex

Or... "What was THAT DECADE AND A HALF all about?"

It’s finally over.

No gold watch. No honors. No well wishes. Nothing but venomous glares from the usual gaggle of corrupted people I’ve been dealing with for years, and the echoes of a metaphorical iron door slamming hard behind me.

And I would have it no other way.

Don’t get me wrong. I needed those fifteen years with AE911Truth, just like every jackass kid in every generation needs a war to enlist in and change him forever… to show him the realities of the world… to remind him of what matters in life and what doesn’t.

I never saw explosions or people killed in front of me. But I did see certain truths about life that pulled down the veil between what the public perceives about the “white hats” fighting the establishment, and how even the industry of rebellion is no different than every other industry that gains some traction and inevitably becomes infested with self-interest and duplicity.

I did the Phil Donahue for 9/11 Truth thing for over a decade. (For any non-truthers, that’s my podcast 9/11 Free Fall, in which I interviewed practically everyone in the 9/11 Truth Movement.) I ran AE911Truth—for all intents and purposes—for the last two years after its board had a civil war that almost ran it into the ground in late 2022… was employed at the place for ten years total.

I volunteered for it for five years before that.

I’ve been there, done that in the 9/11 Truth world. Went to the top of the mountain, came down, bought the T-shirt, ate a sandwich, drove home.

The view at the top wasn’t that great. It wasn’t beautiful, it wasn’t inspiring, it didn’t make me proud of what I was a part of. Most of what I saw as I looked around was a lot of backed up sewage. A once-altruistic cause centered around the deaths of nearly 3,000 people and the glaring holes in the official story surrounding it… transformed into a circus run by narcissistic personalities jockeying for influence and attention in the ever-diminishing donor pool, every little crumb of personal notoriety they could grab, and organizational supremacy/income security for the splinter groups that formed after certain people were terminated.

Mix into that batter a sprinkling of aggressive personalities that, in my view, engaged in COINTELPRO-style behavior (if you don’t know what that is, look it up), and a growing culture of thought control and unaccountability pushed in the name of “unity,” and you have a nice green spray of vomit spewed on every well-meaning and honest person that walks in through the 9/11 Truth Movement’s door.

Yes, I was run out from AE911Truth. Yes, I was treated like a condom you find under the couch two months after using it. Yes, they even put out an inaccurate narrative about my departure.

But I always knew that something like that would end up happening one way or another, so I’m at peace with it. My existence in the 9/11 Truth Movement was always like that of the chef in the old video game Burger Time. For years I was running around trying to make the burgers while being chased by two hotdogs, an egg, and a couple of pissed-off-looking pickles. (Those pickles were fucking scary looking in the 8-bit 1980s.)

What’s interesting about Burger Time is that, like many games of the Atari and Intellivision era, there was no end to it. You never officially “won” the game. You played through a series of different screens, and when you completed the final one, it just brought you to the first screen again, and the enemies that pursued you moved much faster. No matter how many screens you managed to run through, how many enemies you managed to elude… how many burgers you made… you were destined to eventually die.

That game was a good metaphor for life.

The music that played constantly throughout it still haunts my soul.

I’ve been dreaming of this blog for over a year. A chance to say the words in my head out loud. The 9/11 Truth Movement has become very phony and very ridiculous… more so than it was when I first joined it and grinned and bore its toxic climate in the name of fighting for 9/11 justice.

Being a 9/11 Truther baseball-card face should not be a lifelong career for anyone, and though my metaphorical execution was less than honestly handled by AE911Truth, I’m proud that I went down like a champ, forcing them in my final interactions with them to reveal themselves for who they really are deep down.

But more on that whole sordid affair, perhaps, on a later date.

One of the things I’ll never forgive the real perpetrators of the 9/11 crime for—other than the obvious… you know, the mass murder, triggering the endless wars, etc.—is for turning me into a politician, which is what I felt like I was forced to be at AE911Truth by the end.

Politicians are supposed to be willing to do whatever they can to protect their image and their incomes, even if it means lying, shamelessly promoting themselves at every turn, or sticking their finger up in the wind before taking a position on something controversial.

I’m a terrible politician.

Politicians must play ball with factions.

Just like American politics, there are factions in the little society of the 9/11 Truth Movement that better politicians than me are expected to appease. And when I reference these factions and “the 9/11 Truth Movement,” I’m not talking about John and Jane Q. 9/11 Truth supporter who follows the movement casually and who may have no fucking clue what I’m talking about right now. I’m talking about these people who are always there… like ghosts haunting the Overlook Hotel in The Shining.

Every conference call, they’re there. Every event, they’re there. Every corner you turn, there’s one of them standing.

“Come play with us, Andy… forever… and ever… and ever.”

They are the core of the 9/11 Truth Movement because they’re always around, and… unfortunately… they’re pretty much all that’s left of it.

Here’s a breakdown of the categories:

The Unity Cult

These are people who treat the 9/11 Truth Movement like it’s some kind of church following. A lot of “we” talk expressed by them. “We must…” “We can’t…” “We shouldn’t…” and a WHOLE lot of rhetorical grandstanding.

People in the Unity Cult really get upset if you call out movement leaders for their shitty actions and lecture you like some kindergarten teacher correcting your behavior. “We can’t be divisive… we must have unity or the 9/11 evidence won’t be acknowledged!”

They gush over movement leaders like some old biddy, church-going aunt when the deacon is coming over for dinner, laying out the good silverware. And they shield these leaders from any scrutiny or accountability in the name of preventing division and doing “what’s good for the movement.”

Funny how “what’s good for the movement” is always good for movement leaders personally. Sort of like televangelists who proclaim that what’s good for them is good for “Jay-SUS!”

One thing Unity Cult members love is conference calls. The more pointless the better. Typically, they operate under the belief that the more souls that can be packed onto a Zoom meeting, the closer they’ll be to 9/11 justice. Even if nothing productive happens in these meetings, even if most of the people on these calls are doing nothing but converting oxygen to carbon dioxide, these conference calls are essential for projecting the illusion of a lot of action happening.

People give speeches on them, lecture others about what they should be doing while not doing it themselves and congratulate each other for being heroes. They’re a great way of showing supporters something for their money, while also using consensus-model decision making to prevent anything from happening, because every suggestion requires everyone’s approval.

AE911Truth used to have a ton of these meaningless conference calls before I was hired in 2015. Nothing ever happened on them… they were mainly hangouts for AE911Truth founder Richard Gage’s groupies who were eager to rub elbows through Ma Bell with the guy they saw on YouTube.

I was first hired by AE911Truth’s board specifically to make the organization’s volunteer teams more productive, since I had quietly used volunteer power to launch a call-in campaign to C-SPAN’s Washington Journal for a year and a half, eventually getting The Gage onto the program to become its number-one-watched interview in the history of the network. My appointment to this mission bred a lot of resentment from shady figures who wanted to keep the organization unproductive and spinning its wheels with pointless bureaucracy and ineffective (in)action teams… leading to an attempt to recreate AE911Truth’s dysfunction through the formation of another organization.

But that’s a whole other story for another day.

The Cabal

This is a clique of creepy old men (and a couple of women, I guess) that operate like a micro-Illuminati, constantly exerting political pressure on movement leaders and even non-leaders to eliminate anyone who doesn’t believe the official story of what happened at the Pentagon on 9/11.

They’re kind of like AIPAC without the yarmulkes.

My friend, Craig McKee, has been writing about them for years and believes they’re COINTELPRO agents.

One thing is for sure… they’re absolutely fucking relentless about reinforcing that piece of the official 9/11 story. I mean, they write papers about it… give presentations. Even though the establishment is with them on that point, they feel the need to ram that perspective down the 9/11 Truth Movement’s throat on a regular basis. If you challenge them or even give airtime to someone discussing evidence questioning whether a 757 hit the Pentagon, you are marked by the Cabal.

First, they aggressively try to persuade you of their view. When you’re not persuaded, they badger you. When all that doesn’t work, the Cabal tries to eliminate you from the 9/11 Truth Movement. This is done through whisper campaigns attempting to get you fired (if you work for a 9/11 organization) or kicked out of groups, and of course marginalized.

I enjoyed pissing the Cabal off when I was at AE911Truth. They claim to be the scientific wing of the 9/11 Truth Movement and are constantly invoking the scientific method as their mantra (more as a marketing phrase than in practice). When talking about the Pentagon on 9/11 they selectively edit quotes to fit their narrative and misrepresent evidence. They have a real pompous demeanor about them, as if they’ve each already won their Nobel Prize for harassing truthers.

They are persistent in their mission to purge the truth movement of questions about the Pentagon. One member of the movement—an attractive young woman who picked up a significant audience with her podcast early when she was a newbie to the cause—reported to me that a member of the Cabal contacted her when she first showed up on the scene, attempting to instruct her on who to stay away from in the 9/11 Truth Movement.

Talk about balls.

Of course, the people on his list of untouchables were all people who didn’t believe the Pentagon official story.

The Pentagon is important because the fact that it was attacked made 9/11 an act of war, allegedly justifying the U.S. military’s post-9/11 adventures overseas.

There are a lot of crazy theories thrown around in the 9/11 Truth Movement, such as the notion that holograms hit the Twin Towers and not airplanes. Not only do I not believe every crackpot thing about 9/11 that people come up with, but I’ve had a lot of fun debunking them quickly when individuals try to push them on me.

However, I don’t put the questions about the Pentagon on 9/11 into that category. The team that got the ball rolling on the Pentagon evidence—Citizen’s Investigation Team (CIT)—did some very intriguing work in the early 2000s by going to the site of the alleged crash and interviewing very credible witnesses who were there, including police officers (professionals trained to observe and report when crazy shit happens in front of them) and workers at the Citgo gas station that was located near the scene. All those witnesses reported seeing the airplane that supposedly crashed into the building on a completely different flight path than the one we were told it followed… even drew the flight paths they witnessed on an aerial photograph of the area. All their sketched lines were remarkably similar.

What CIT did was real investigative work, and regardless of what anyone wants to believe about the theory that the plane crash at the Pentagon was staged, the fact that multiple witnesses reported seeing an airplane on a different path than the one we were told it was on by our government is more than worthy of note when putting together the pieces of what happened there on that day. Just because it doesn’t fit into the narrative we were given, and just because some of us aren’t yet ready to embrace the conclusion it’s brought many to about a staged crash scene, doesn’t mean you throw those testimonies into the trash, as the Cabal pushes members of the 9/11 Truth Movement to do.

If we were lied to about what happened at the Pentagon on 9/11, considering that the building is the heart of the U.S. military, then that would show direct U.S. government complicity in the plot… even more so than the controlled demolitions of the World Trade Center towers in New York.

If there were COINTELPRO agents embedded in the 9/11 Truth Movement, I could see why they would want the lingering questions about the Pentagon crash dismissed.

The Coyotes

These are a group of trolls that operate in a pack… debunkers poorly disguised as 9/11 Truthers, hounding members of the movement online, following the playbook outlined by former Obama administration information czar Cass Sunstein when he called for cognitive infiltration of conspiracy groups in a published paper many years ago. This plan entailed embedding agents in such groups and having them constantly try to reinforce official narratives, piece by piece, until the conspiracy theorists around them threw up their hands and abandoned their pesky inquisitiveness about major world events.

It’s not hard to speculate about the Coyotes being agents, as it doesn’t make sense for individuals who do nothing but voice disdain for 9/11 Truthers to spend their lives going to 9/11 Truth meetings and critically pouncing on every post that Truthers make on social media within minutes of those posts going up. If they are agents, the Coyotes are proof that Uncle Sam doesn’t employ the best and the brightest for such work. Typically, the comments they leave on posts are the literary equivalent of fart noises being made while someone is trying to speak. Often the Coyotes just make stuff up to support their points when they have no actual point to make. If they get in trouble in an online debate, they call out to others in their pack to help them by tagging pack members’ names in their comments.

In my encounters with them, I often felt like Bugs Bunny dealing with his adversaries… tangoing with a couple of dolts easily led off a cliff simply by engaging them in an impromptu square dance. What’s strange—(though not strange considering everything I wrote several paragraphs above)—is that despite this behavior, the Unity Cult still includes them in every online meeting, regarding them like some asshole brother-in-law who can’t be excluded from family gatherings because their sister married them.

Unity at any cost.

The Professional Professionals

This faction is not the most offensive… just hard to connect with. These are the people who take everything so seriously that if you crack an innocent joke, they look confused, as if not knowing what to do next.

The word “professional” is thrown around by them a lot. White papers and dry presentations reminiscent of work meetings about quarterly sales figures are the only road to 9/11 justice in their view.

These people operate under the belief that if the 9/11 Truth Movement is just polite enough and just professional enough, the establishment will one day be so impressed by it that they’ll do a 180 and start covering the WTC evidence.

The real 9/11 culprits will say, “Son, we like the cut of your jib so much… you know what? Fuck it. We confess. Send us to prison.”

They also use “professionalism” as a shield if they do something shitty and you call them out for it. They’re much like the Unity Cult in this way. Pointing out their misdeeds is unprofessional.

Anyway…

I’ve managed to piss all of them off in my tenure at AE911Truth, in one way or another, most of the time without even trying. Again, I’m a shitty politician. My rise at AE911Truth was more like Charlie Bucket’s rise to chocolate factory owner… being the kid who survived as the others were eliminated over the years through various terminations… still caring about the mission and giving our supporters value for their money right up to the end, even if others didn’t.

I’m old-fashioned like that.

These hotdogs, pickles, and that egg composing the factions listed above have been chasing me for a long time. The game got boring and seemingly would never end. Mix into the bag my frustration with the dysfunction that I was discouraged from cleaning up, and it was getting time to flip some tables at the market on Passover.

Now… it is accomplished.

I will note, none of these groups had a hand in my removal from AE. I was canolied by my own goombahs.

I’d love to talk more about it, but I’m a little cautious about getting into it right now. I want to know, legally, first what I’m allowed to write about publicly.

Frankly, I don’t even want to think about those people anymore. Flush! It’s time to wipe my ass and stomp my foot… get the circulation back after ten years on the pot.

This blog is not another 9/11 Truth group. I’m not raising money… in fact, I actively discourage you from giving me any… or anyone, for that matter. Whatever I offer here, if you find it useful at all, I give away for free.

I don’t want to spend much time talking about AE911Truth or my years there… only when applicable and in the proper mood… such as now, since I got released from the place, this is the first blog post, and it would be kind of weird if I didn’t say anything about it.

This blog is my hobby… opinion and some investigative journalism, shared in the way I want to share it… my way… free of movement politics, gatekeeping activists lecturing me about being divisive… or proper grammar and sentence structure.

Welcome aboard.

Let’s have some fun together.

I think we’ve earned it.

I have, at least.