The Truth Movement and Loose Change: Selling Faux Legitimacy

This is important to note as a matter of record: the people from the far fringe right who founded and promoted the 9/11 "Truth" Movement went out of their way to appeal to the public and recruit persons to sell the "movement" as legit.  Public appeal would reach its apex through "Loose Change" and the three personalities recruited and/or manipulated to push it:  Dylan Avery, Jason Bermas and Korey Rowe.

There is much misguided anger directed at the Loose Change producers that would be better directed at Macromedia and the many interests who funded and egged on the trio. They've been called "traitors" and worse by pro-Bush debunkers, honest or otherwise.  An entire blog was dedicated to supposedly debunking the flawed facts in the film.  Years later, long after Loose Change has faded from public eye, the blog is still going allegedly exposing "truther" lies, but actually acting as platform for the same lies it claims to be exposing.  SLC purpose has always appeared to be a glorified gossip column trying to pass itself off as independent journalism.  It was easy to get legitimacy by mocking Loose Change; since then few who praised the blog in it's early days have revisited the site for an honest reappraisal. 

Even  rabid fans of the blog expressed wonder about the blog owners giving a platform to extremists:

 At 14 December, 2006 15:09,

 shawn said...
Ban ewing, please.

 At 14 December, 2006 17:12,  The Artistic Macrophage said...
ewing:

here is some advice. Provided you actually have the intellect to debate some of the 9/11 issues, you would actually get much more attention if you did debate, rather than spam. I can tell you that I personally immediately scroll over your posts without looking at them simply because they are spam.

TAM

 At 14 December, 2006 22:40,  Pat said...
Shawn, Ewing is Nico Haupt. I don't mind him spamming the comments because he does come up with interesting stuff as does BG.

 I suppose if one equates "interesting" garbage spam pushing a fraud with real journalism.

Hindsight being what it is, it's obvious "ewing" was a patsy in an elaborate fraud, his crazy act encouraged as a distraction.   For all it's 15 minutes of fame popular appeal "Loose Change" was never the problem, per se.  It was a symptom, or the latest reiteration of a problem: right extremists looking for new markets to sell New World Order woo, in this case one packaged and pitched to the anti war crowd.

"The Almond"; at JREF sums up the political climate of the time succinctly:

  8th October 2010, 05:18 AM
 The Almond

Perhaps more than you realize. In 2005~2006, when the 9/11 conspiracy theories were starting to become popular, many people thought it was a legitimate movement. By legitimate, I mean, news agencies and the public believed that a large, diverse group of people had conducted honest, thoughtful research and had realized that a conspiracy existed. This perception caused many people to see Loose Change (made by Bermas and Avery), and give the Truth movement the benefit of the doubt.

Of course, the first thing that was clear in 2006 was that this largely internet based fad was full of 3 groups of people:

1) Disaffected teenagers and 20-somethings who had nothing better to do
2) Neo-nazis, holocaust deniers
3) The insane, chronically uninformed or gullible

This little recent tidbit once again confirms what we've been saying for the past 4 years: The Truth movement is not a group of concerned citizens from all walks of life who are united by a logically consistent, evidence informed point of view. Rather, they're a loose agglomeration of disaffected 20-somethings, and when you step out of the internet reality they've created, they're living in their mom's basement, sucking down cheetos and wishing they were more popular and interesting.

The only point of contention I find with Almond's post is there should be four, not three categories.  By definition, if the anti-war public perceived a legitimate movement, some of them would join, making a fourth group:

4) Anit-war/anti Bush activists duped, for however long, by the previous three groups.

This last group is where most of the responsible truthers came from and why most of them are gone: once it was clear the movement refused to denounce the Holocaust denier/Nazis types, it was a short trip to the painful eye-opener that the Movement was always about pushing far right racist propaganda.  The anti-war hook was a sham to build a base.  "Loose Change" was a handy vehicle to support that sham.

It won't end well.