BEg2 Chap 8 Summary Part 1

[David Morris]

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/trutherism/2011/09/where_did_911_conspiracies_come_from.html

Where Did 9/11 Conspiracies Come From? The fringe.

“9/11 conspiracy theories predate 9/11. On July 25, 2001, in a
two-and-a-half-hour broadcast of his *Infowars* TV program on a local
public-access channel, Alex Jones laid out what he saw as the history of
government-manufactured false- <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_flag>flag
attacks, from the Gulf of Tonkin
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulf_of_Tonkin_incident> incident that Lyndon
Johnson used to draw the United States deeper into the Vietnam War to the
first attack on the World Trade Center in 1993 and the Oklahoma City
bombing in 1995, which Jones claimed
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bf1c0k7S7MM> was government-manufactured
terrorism orchestrated to help Bill Clinton boost his poll numbers and
suppress civil liberties. […] On the day the Twin Towers fell, Jones began
his broadcast by declaring that, as he had predicted, the Bush
administration had taken part in a staged terror attack. "I'll tell you the
bottom line," Jones said. "98 percent chance this was a
government-orchestrated controlled bombing."

[…]

Before 9/11, Ruppert had been working on other conspiracy theories—about a
government supercomputer program, about accusations that AIG was laundering
drug money, about alleged drug-running by the CIA. He had been obsessed
with the CIA and drugs ever since he says the agency tried to recruit him
through his ex-fiancee, "Teddy," while he was an LAPD narcotics officer in
1976. The dramatic tale of his descent from up-and-coming cop into career
paranoiac is told in Jonathan Kay's chapter on the psychology of
conspiracists in his book *Among the Truthers
<http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0062004816/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=slatmaga-20&linkCode=as2&camp=217145&creative=399373&creativeASIN=0062004816>*:
"Within two years of meeting 'Teddy,' Ruppert checked himself into a
psychiatric hospital, complaining about death threats. Soon thereafter, he
left the LAPD, and began peddling different versions of his story—including
the contention that the CIA tried to recruit versions of his
story—including the contention that the CIA tried to recruit him to protect
its L.A.-area drug operations—to whatever credulous journalists would
listen." It was Ruppert's website From the Wilderness that was one of the
first to start questioning the official account of 9/11.

On the morning of 9/11, Ruppert was exchanging emails with his ex-wife, who
witnessed the attacks from her 35th floor Battery Park apartment. As
Ruppert attempted to hold her hand virtually while she watched the North
Tower burn, he watched live on TV as the second plane struck the South
Tower.

"As soon as the second plane hit, I knew that this was totally wrong," he
told me [this Slate journalist].  "I may not have reported it right away,
but I was in full investigative mode from the second I saw the second
airplane hit the tower." And when the Pentagon was struck by Flight 77, it
was all the confirmation Ruppert needed that the government had been
complicit. […]
As early as November 2001, Ruppert was lecturing in front of 1,000 people
at Portland State University
<http://web.archive.org/web/20021022030029/http:/www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/12_05_01_portland.html>
on
the "Truth and Lies of 9/11," which he recorded and soon started marketing.
He went on to catalog his From the Wilderness reports into a book, *Crossing
the Rubicon: The Decline of the American Empire at the End of the Age of
Oil
<http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0865715408/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=slatmaga-20&linkCode=as2&camp=217145&creative=399369&creativeASIN=0865715408>*,
which has sold more than 100,000 copies.

On Fri, Dec 10, 2021 at 6:40 PM David Morris <fqmorris at gmail.com> wrote:

> I’d like to make a couple observations about what is “clear” about Michael
> Ruppert:
>
> 1.  Ruppert’s  promoting of 9/11 conspiracies has made him second only to
> Alex Jones as a trusted source in wingnut circles.  I’m not familiar with
> his theory about Israeli microchips and 9/11, but it must have been very
> successful, because somehow Israelis later managed to also have their
> microchips manufactured into the COVID-19 vaccines.
>
>