Life after "Loose Change"

It's nice to see Avery seems to be free of the "truther" octopus , though he is marked.   I don't know if the author intended this, but the title is a clue to the phoniness of the movement Avery and company were seduced into fronting.  No one rises that fast to fame on very few credentials or history without a backing interest.  And that interest may not have your best interests:

 https://www.vocativ.com/usa/us-politics/rapid-rise-fall-dylan-avery/

The Rapid Rise and Fall of Dylan Avery

With his 9/11 conspiracy doc "Loose Change," director Dylan Avery became an Internet sensation and a leader of a movement. Then the film grew into a monster that nearly ruined his life

 Highlights:

At 30 years old, Avery is still dealing with the aftershocks of his movie, which he released in December 2005 when he was just 21. In a matter of months, Loose Change had been viewed on the Internet more than 10 million times, by 20,000 people per day (All before YouTube was a household name). Suddenly, Avery became a youth icon and a kind of national celebrity, galvanizing the 9/11 Truth Movement—those who fervently believed the Sept. 11 attacks were coordinated by the U.S. government.
He was referred to as “a real hero” and earned praise from renowned artists like director David Lynch, who said of the film: “It’s not so much what they say, it’s the things that make you look at what you thought you saw in a different light.”

...

Even now, the second edition’s appeal is obvious. The presentation is rough and edgy, a compilation of stitched-together images culled from raw TV news coverage of 9/11, set against a backdrop of hypnotic hip-hop beats. For 80 minutes, Avery, in his distinctly skeptical post-adolescent voice—the sound of youthful arrogance—directs the viewer’s attention to suspicious activity, basically saying what to think.
Early on, for instance, there is a picture from the Department of Justice’s terrorism manual, released in 2000, that shows the World Trade Center set in crosshairs. Soon afterward, a sentence from “Rebuilding America’s Defenses,” a 90-page report published that same year by a neoconservative think tank, pops up on the screen: “The process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event—like a new Pearl Harbor.” (The quote’s context, describing a timetable for a technological makeover of the military, is conveniently left out of the narrative.)

Bold mine.  This was one of the many dishonest  and deceptive pieces of propaganda and Avery didn't start it.  He just fell for it.

Avery then points out that Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld are among the report’s authors, the setup for a key assertion that comes later in the film: The twin towers, made of steel, could not have been brought down solely by airliners, since steel melts at 2,750 degrees while jet fuel burns up at 1,500. We watch grainy footage of the structures collapsing, the nature of the destruction apparently consistent with that of a controlled demolition. Taken together, the sequence is enormously effective (though debunkers were quick to point out that steel loses half its strength at 1,200 degrees, enough to have brought down the towers).

So much for termites, er, thermite.

 “It came out when the 9/11 Truth Movement was at its peak,” says Jonathan Kay, author of Among the Truthers. “All this new technology was available. At the time, people were not used to grassroots activists making high-quality video propaganda. People assumed that if it had high production values, it was something to take seriously.

Kay, dense or oblivious about other connections in the "truth" movement, makes a very good point here that can be expanded into all sorts of promotions: T-shirts, webdesign, signage, etc.   It used to take a significant investment of resources and skills to create and print logos.  Now branding can be virtually instant and distinguishing a legitimate grassroots organization from conspiracy astroturf is almost impossible based on  production values alone.  [One of the more pathetic attempts to appear grassroots that's still used is crude signage in black felt or tape.  In the post digital world it just looks strange.]  

When the boys were 17, Rowe dropped out of high school and eventually enlisted in the Army, while Avery applied to film school, at SUNY Oneonta, but didn’t get in. After he graduated, in 2002, he took a job doing local construction and began to sketch out a screenplay. It was a fantastical caper about a couple of boys who, sensing something nefarious, decide to investigate 9/11, unearthing a vast conspiracy and becoming heroes in the process. “It was fun,” Avery explains. “About kids fucking shit up. The original script ended with a rally on the White House lawn, and then I think we all fake our own deaths.”
The plan was to splice the fictional story with real-life news footage, but then it turned into a documentary. “It was kind of a self-fulfilling prophecy,” he admits. “The feature script definitely paved the way for what was about to come.”

Hindsight being 20/20 it could also have been a flag for the psychological yearnings behind the fiction, yearnings that could be played.   

The next two years were a whirlwind. The boys toured the country, screening their film and attending Truth conferences, where they were the stars. They were courted by Alex Jones, the rabid conservative conspiracy theorist and radio host who, among other things, believes the MSG found in juice boxes and kettle chips is part of a “chemical warfare operation” to spread homosexuality. He was at the forefront of the Truth Movement and rubbed shoulders with celebrities like Charlie Sheen, who was a Truther himself and a big fan of Loose Change. In early fall 2006, Jones facilitated an introduction between Sheen and the boys, suggesting the actor might narrate the next version of the movie, which would, with his cache, lead to a theatrical release.

From here the rest is a foregone conclusion:  the rise, the heady feeling of self importance inflated by ego flattering "minders",   the attempts at manipulation, some successful, some not:

 Avery was tired and beginning to grow wary of both the Truth Movement and his place in it. “There were anti-Semites saying the Israeli intelligence agency pulled off 9/11,” he says. “They wanted me to put that stuff in my films.” In a bizarre twist, some in the movement accused him of working for the government, conducting a disinformation campaign to discredit Truthers.

This is one of the many signs Avery and others were drawn into a complex political fraud instigated by Holocaust deniers and White Power organizers.  that and the perennial lie there are "agents" in the movement.

Others, who disagreed with his ideas, berated him on a popular blog called Screw Loose Change, where commenters regularly said things like, “Jeez, fucking Hitler must be proud of Dylan.”

Ironically Screw Loose Change was one of the worst enablers of the "truther" fraud.  By refusing to distinguish between people inventing the theories and the people conned by them, they validated the con.  Calling everyone scammed by the "truth" movement a Nazi is not helpful and appears to confirm the false idea of "agents" spreading "disinfo".

“Loose Change happened because I wanted to make a film,” he said. “It was born out of the passion of wanting to be a filmmaker. And then Loose Change took over my life, and it’s almost like filmmaking is completely out of the question.”

 ...

Yet he’s excited about his new film, Black and Blue, especially because it’s grounded in fact-based stories, not theories, about people who have been abused by the police. And though questions still linger about 9/11, such as why, on Sept. 6, 2001, the daily average for put-options on United Airlines stock quadrupled, he no longer tortures himself with speculation. “In my truly angry times, in 2005 or 2006, if you asked if the Bush administration planned the attacks, I would have said, ‘Fuck yeah’.”
But now?
“I don’t think Bush could plan a bowl of cereal,” he says.

 ...

 Avery is silent for a moment. “It’s a dark, dangerous world, the world of conspiracy. You make a commitment and either stick with it to the very end, or you don’t. It’s easy to get sucked in, and really hard to get sucked back out.”

 I don't know.  The minute I knew a network of racist con artists were behind all the major "truther" talking points, it was really easy for me.

.....

My biggest criticism of the interview is  Vocative itself, a relatively new media outlet.  It's great Dylan is coming forth with his story, but try to chose a media platform with a history, like Huffo or Salon.  No offense to "vocative", but it's only a year old:

Vocativ is an online news website founded by Mati Kochavi.^[2] The site publishes trending worldwide stories and highly-produced, documentary-style videos for broadcast online and on television. Vocativ was launched in 2013 by Mati Kochavi. Vocativ has a team of about 80 news editors, writers and producers from publications like the New York Times, CNN and Reuters.^[3][4] Vocativ utilizes "Deep-web" technology to publish news articles. Kochavi is an entrepreneur owning a security firm AGT International and 3i-MIND, a data-mining outlet.^[5] In February, 2014, Vocativ announced a partnership with the NBCUniversal News Group to produce short video segments and prime time hours for the MSNBC cable network and other NBCUNG platforms. The New York Times reported that the chief executive of talent agency William Morris Endeavor, Ari Emmanuel, had taken a personal interest in Vocativ and that his company was negotiating for an equity stake.^[6]

Those who have broken free of the "truth" movement need to be on guard against unconsciously falling into old patterns. This has the marks of Avery shunning the "mainstream media".  If he thought about it a moment, the mainstream media wasn't responsible for most of the attacks; it was cowboy bloggers operating off deceptive information, usually obtained from con artists and social engineers.  And while MSM is not undeserving of criticism, they are far and away more responsible than cowboy bloggers with an ax to grind against the left.

Good luck, Dylan.